Virtual-EMI lab: Removing mysteries from black-magic to a successful front-end design

Abstract

EMI engineers are struggling everyday with complex radiation problems that fail critical products to pass EMI certification and causes big loss of profit. Advances in EMI engineering are following a similar trend like Signal-Integrity engineering 10-years ago when simulation tools became capable of providing accurate predictive simulations in a reasonable amount of time. With careful engineering utilizing cutting-edge full-wave field-solver software: Momentum (MOM) [1], EMpro (FDTD) [2] along with a hardware boost with heterogeneous massive CPU/GPU parallel processing (CUDA) technology [3], we can move the EMI teams from the back-end black-magic to a successful cost-effective front-end design. This paper presents an innovative process (Virtual-EMI lab) for pre- and post-tape-out providing the designers with an early stage EMI-suppression matrix (on-chip and onboard enablers) to find the optimum trade-off between performance and cost.