Study of the radiated susceptibility of an electronic system using induced electromagnetic non-linear effects

The objective of this paper is to propose an improved approach based on a novel non-intrusive method for easily assess the high frequency CW EM radiated susceptibility of an electronic system by characterizing its non-linear electromagnetic-effects. For this purpose, we have developed a specific harmonic frequency detection system coupled with a mode stirrer reverberating chamber. We describe the principles of the method, and we study a generic device board which is representative of a real electronic system. We evaluate the EM susceptibility of a micro controller in full functional mode and the data exchanges with two types of external 8Mb SRAM memories. We observe the EM radiated susceptibility of this device by a functional EMC analysis method; then we measure the harmonic frequency content and make a correlation with the EM susceptibility results. We obtain significant differences between the two memory devices, as a consequence of their different management of internal voltage over stress. We are well aware that this method is currently not validated in industrial environments EMC. In this paper, we only wanted to show that the appearance of the highest harmonic level occurs only when that DUT has the highest functional failure.