Approaches to radiated emissions reduction of powertrain control modules

Abstract

Basic concepts and guidelines for design of an electromagnetically compliant automotive electronic system are available today. At the same time system-specific configurations sometimes make the final EMC behavior unpredictable. This contribution addresses some experimental approaches used for radiated emissions reduction from Motorola MPC500 family-based powertrain control modules. The applied approaches include analysis of possible noise sources in the microcontroller unit, reduction of core power supply coupling through high-speed PWB routing, application of low ESL decoupling capacitors, filtered connectors and the spread-spectrum clock generation (SSCG) technique. All approaches were validated by radiated emission measurements in a semi-anechoic chamber according to the CISPR 25 measurement technique. The adopted strategy allowed us to obtain the EMC compliant powertrain control module.