EMC evaluation in integrated circuits using VHDL-AMS

Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) compliance is a topical demand in any electronic system, often representing a substantial part of the design effort. The sooner EMC rules are taken into account in the design phase, the sooner the target product can be released on the market, lowering engineering costs at the same time. However, with ever increasing complexity in integrated circuits (ICs), and thus ever higher emission and susceptibility levels, it can be seen that reducing these levels in the IC themselves then makes it much easier to ensure system-level EMC compliance. This paper proposes a VHDL-AMS based methodology aimed at modelling and predicting conducted emission levels of ICs within the design How. This approach, using the ICEM (integrated circuit electromagnetic model) proposal, allows the designer to build reusable, fast to simulate, behavioral dynamic activity models that can be combined in order to evaluate the whole activity of a complex IC, including inputs and outputs as well as highly integrated blocks like memories. The influence of the internal power distribution can also be studied before IC layout. Comparisons between simulations and measurements have been performed on a real-world microcontroller (from ATMEL) and demonstrate the validity of this approach in an industrial context, leading to the development of intellectual-property (IP) activity models.