When you're working to get your new design to market fast, the last thing you want is to get held up by compliance testing failures at the end of your design cycles. Incorporating a precompliance solution into your work processes gives you many benefits:

• Early identification of potential EMI/EMC issues that may delay time-to-market and increase development costs
• Reduction of EMI/EMC related costs
• Increased confidence in your product before you take it to the test house
• Immediate feedback on the impact of design changes
• Flexibility to test on your schedule

EMI/EMC pre-compliance testing doesn’t have to be hard or excessively time consuming. Based on customer feedback, Tektronix developed next-generation software with ease of use and functionality in mind, to provide pre-compliance testing for radiated and conducted measurements.

Setting up EMI/EMC pre-compliance testing starts with SignalVu-PC. This latest version of SignalVu-PC now comes with an additional option called EMCVu. EMCVu features an easy-to-use setup wizard, built-in standards and accessory setup with push-button selection capabilities. Whether you are setting up an Open-Air Test Site (OATS), or testing in your lab, EMCVu streamlines the capture and removal of ambient noise from your measurements to increase the accuracy of your pre-compliance tests without an anechoic chamber.

To learn more about using EMCVu with real time spectrum analyzers and accessories to perform pre-compliance tests for radiated and conducted emissions, download the application note here.

If you’re interested in trying a free 30-day trial of EMCVu, please click on the button below.

Tektronix’ EMCVu pre-compliance software supports EMC standards including CISPR, FCC and MIL-STD for many types of devices. To automate testing, EMCVu provides a built-in standards table allowing you to choose the applicable standard for your product and the region it will be sold in. EMCVu also allows you to configure standards not included with the ability to set frequency ranges or limit line tables for your chosen standard.

A quick summary of supported standards is below:

Before you invest the time and money in final product certification testing, you want confidence that your device is ready to go to the test house. When you run into a problem, you want the right tools that allow you to focus on problem areas quickly, identify the cause and take steps to remediate without incurring costly delays.

To efficiently debug, look for a solution that lets you quickly identify areas of concern and provides the level of signal insight that captures intermittent offenders. This is delivered by a combination of hardware and software.

Some of capabilities you should look for in your software solution include:

• Quasi-Peak detector which lets you bypass non-failures and zero in on frequencies of interest.
• Harmonic Check which allows you to test only specific harmonics and find where those emissions come from on a board using a near field probe.
• Harmonic Markers which enables finding emissions at harmonics of a known frequency.
• Multiple Traces allowing you to compare the Device Under Test (DUT) to Ambient Noise, previous iterations of a Device, etc.
• Automated or manual multi-failure re-measurement, allowing you to determine if a failure is intermittent or reoccurring.
• Report multiple measurements in multiple formats in the same user configurable report.

With hardware, Real-Time Spectrum Analyzers make EMI debug much easier. Some of the benefits provided by a real-time spectrum analyzer include:

• The ability to capture transient and intermittent signals.
• The ability to debug multiple sources at the same frequency.
• Instantaneous feedback – traditional swept spectrum analyzers sweeps can take longer and result in failure in capturing important signals.

To learn more on how to use our Real-Time Spectrum Analyzers for emissions pre-compliance testing on our blog here. Additional information on troubleshooting techniques are available in the “Practical EMI Troubleshooting” application note that you can download by clicking on the button below.

To root out sources of radiated emissions that lead to EMI issues, it's critical to identify the makeup of the emissions. Next, one must identify the aggressors and the coupling mechanisms. Using a mixed domain oscilloscope like the 4, 5 or 6 Series MSO with Spectrum View, one can capture a synchronized view of spectrums and time domain waveforms for fast identification of the culprits.

• Any analog channel can be viewed as a waveform, spectrum, or both
• Plot and trigger on changes in RF frequency or magnitude
• Spectrums and time domain waveforms are synchronized to correlate RF and time domain events for faster identification of root cause
• Spectrum controls such as center frequency and RBW are independent of time domain controls, allowing optimization of spectrum and waveform displays