Troubleshooting automotive radiated Emission non-compliance, a practical approach

Radiated Emission non-compliance at vehicle-level is an EMC challenge for supplier design engineers and ultimately for automotive OEM validation team. However, infrequently an undesirable situation may result due to the complexity of RF Interference environment of modern vehicles. The vehicle level radiated emission compliance validation is extremely complex and costly and not suitable for troubleshooting. As a result, component-level radiated emission specifications of automotive sector demands stringent pass/fail limit requirements and is viewed as one of the most difficult design challenges for EMC engineers. The modern vehicle is abundantly rich in noise source with a large number of electrical and electronic components interacting via sensors and vehicle communication networks. In this paper, we describe a vehicle-level radiated emission non-compliance, critical engineering observations and sensible data collections at vehicle test site, complying with time and budget constraints. Hence the mitigation techniques applied at the supplier laboratory to resolve the radiated emission failure without requiring additional retest iterations at vehicle-level are described.