Customer Reviews

Emc & the Printed Circuit Board: Design, Theory, & Layout Made Simple

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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There are two basic approaches to designing a system for low EMI emissions and EM compatability: One is to build the system and put it inside an enclosure with lots of shielding to contain the EMI. Another approach is to design the PCB so that it has low EMI and does not require very much shielding from the enclosure. Mark Montroses' book provides lots of detailed information on just how to design PCBs with low EMI. Unlike many books that give general coverage of EMI and EMC problems, this book focuses exclusively on PCB layout and design techniques for EMC.

Chapter 5 (Bypassing and Decoupling) is especially interesting. It used to be enough to simply place one 0.1uF capacitor next to each IC on a PCB. But with todays high speed circuits, this doesn't always work anymore. In fact, simply putting .1uF caps next to each chip can actually cause the system to fail if the resonant frequency of the bypass network happens to match the system clock frequency (or a harmonic of it).
Instead, you must consider the resonant frequency of the bypass capacitors and build a network of different valued capacitors for an effective bypass network. Marks book does a good job of explaining why this is true and what to do about it.

Chapter 4 (Image Planes) is also interesting. Understanding what image planes are and how they work is one of the keys to designing a PCB for low EMI.

This is a good reference book that should be in every high speed PCB designers library.

If you are a circuit designer building a commercial product, then it is necessary to minimise the RF emissions. But many texts on circuitry gloss over the details of how to do this. Perhaps considered too uninteresting.

Montrose offers a detailed contrast. But readily accessible to anyone with an electrical engineering degree. Hence you can read tips on how to reduce the loop area on a PCB. Indeed, he suggests that you can use surface mount components, since they usually possess smaller loop area.

There are also recent innovations. Like grounding a heatsink for a microprocessor. The latest CPUs often dissipate enormous amounts of heat. But hitherto, little attention was often paid to actually grounding the requisite heatsink.

The book also devotes an entire chapter to the crucial idea of an image plane. It points out possible problems with an implementation, and how to solve these.

This book is well oganized and easy to use, but the information is often incorrect. We have found it to cause more problems than solve. Paul Clayton's book come much more highly recommended.

Practical explanation of printed circuit board emissions, routing, trace termination ... covers all aspects of the printed circuit board. A must for the PCB engineer's reference shelf.

Mark Montrose is a well world wide known guru from the EMC techniques. In his book he has discovered some ways to do the things as 20h, or 3w rules. This book is not speciallized in any topic but it cover deeply the classical aspects of the decoupling, power distribution, grounding, shielding and the transmission lines. I think that it be should be read by everybody that deal on PCB design and hardware design.
I recommend highly as starting point in the EMC science, so it has very basic theory from the begining.