Full-Wave Modeling and Experimental Characterization of Electromagnetic Emissions From Printed Circuit Boards

The phenomenon of electromagnetic (EM) emission from printed circuit boards (PCBs) is demonstrated through numerical simulations as well as laboratory-scale measurements. On the simulation side, a systematic workflow is presented for translating conventional circuit designs into numerical models, where the analysis is carried out by employing the nonconformal domain decomposition method (DDM). To improve the efficiency of numerical computation, an interface skeleton is developed by compressing the subdomain information to the touching interfaces and discarding the noncritical field variables recursively. The experimental characterization of EM field emissions in this work employs a vector network analyzer (VNA), a magnetic field probe, and computer-controlled positioners. Through simulation and measurement, several experiments have been conducted to validate the proposed approach to model stray radiation from circuit boards in the form of near-field radiation patterns. Furthermore, the impact of the probe geometry on capturing the emitted fields and the hot spots in electronic radiation are presented.