The Clemson Vehicular Electronics Laboratory (CVEL) collaborates with industrial sponsors to provide research and education services involving all aspects of automotive and aerospace vehicle electronics including electronic components, circuits, sensors, communications, power distribution and mechatronics with an emphasis on systems integration, electromagnetic compatibility and modeling.

Site Organization

This site has four main sections. The automotive electronics section includes tutorials and information relevant to electronic systems in cars, trucks, tanks, submarines, ships and various other land and water vehicles powered by gasoline, fuel cells, batteries or hybrid systems. The aerospace electronics section is devoted to electronics in air and space vehicles. Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) plays an extremely important role is the development and maintenance of the electronic systems in all vehicular designs and therefore an entire section of the web site is devoted to EMC and the control of conducted and radiated electromagnetic interference (EMI), including intentional electromagnetic interference (IEMI). This section includes several tutorials and a collection of "EMC Design Guidelines". Finally there is a section devoted to electromagnetic modeling. Computational electromagnetic modeling tools are becoming an increasingly important part of the automotive and aerospace electronics design process. This section describes the tools that are available and provides tutorial information for people who are just getting started in EM modeling.

Information on our laboratory can be accessed using the links in the sidebar on the left. These links include descriptions of some of our current projects as well as an overview of our staff, facilities and services.

News

The UMR/MST EMC Consortium is now an NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center.

Texas Instruments has released an interesting new product for sending wide-band digital signals across a capacitively isolated interface. Its called a digital isolator.

What's New at CVEL

An error in the Near-Field Shielding Effectiveness Calculator has been corrected. Previously, it did not recognize the setting of the electric field / magnetic field radio buttons. Note that calculators like this solve the equations described in the shielding theory notes. However, as described in the notes on practical EM shielding, they should not be used to try to predict the shielding effectiveness of shields used in product applications.

With the help of the AuE 893 Automotive Electronics Integration class at CU-ICAR, the automotive electronics section of this website has been greatly expanded. There are new sections on automotive systems, sensors and actuators plus a few interesting class projects.

Prof. Hubing authored a chapter in the new book, Automotive Informatics and Communicative Systems. The book can be found on Amazon.com or individual chapters can be obtained from InfoSci-On -Demand.

Clemson is forming a consortium of companies involved in the development and manufacturing of capacitors to meet the energy storage and power distribution requirements of advanced electronic technologies. A planning meeting was held on January 21, 2009.

A Resistance Calculator and a Shielding Effectiveness Calculator have been added to the EMC web page. These calculators were written by students in Clemson's Grounding and Shielding class.

Our lists of EMC, Signal Integrity and electromagnetic modeling books have been greatly expanded.

Our short course offerings have been updated and a new course in computer modeling tools for EMC engineers has been added.

We are completing our survey of electromagnetic modeling software, which will be published on this site later this fall. In the meantime though, we have had a flurry of updates to our list of free EM modeling software and list of commercial EM modeling software.

A new section on EMC Regulations has been added and the lists of Automotive EMC Standards, Avionics EMC Standards, and Commercial EMC Standards were recently updated. Seven new articles, Common Impedance Coupling, Faraday's Law for EMC Engineers, Transient Protection, Electromagnetic Radiation, Time/Frequency Domain, Identifying Current Paths, and Printed Circuit Board Layout have been added to our EMC Tutorials section. We will continue to add tutorial articles to this section throughout the rest of the year.

CVEL hosted a workshop on Advances in Automotive EMC Test and Design on March 12, 2008.

If you'd like to know more about what we've been up to lately, here are slides from recent presentations:

Automotive Electronics Presentations

Electronic Systems Research at CU-ICAR

Tools and Techniques for Ensuring Automotive EMC Performance and Reliability
Presented in an IEEE Webinar titled, "Automotive Electronics - Advanced Simulation and Test Solutions Tackle EMC Requirements", Sep. 23, 2008

Automotive Component Measurements for Determining Vehicle-Level Radiated Emissions
Presented in the Automotive EMC workshop at EMC Europe 2008, Hamburg, Germany, Sep. 2008

PCB Radiation Mechanisms: Using Component-Level Measurements to Determine System-Level Radiated Emissions
Presented at the 2008 Asia-Pacific Symposium on EMC, May 2008

Electromagnetic Compatibility & CAN Bus
Presented to the AuE881 class at Clemson, November 2007

EMC Expert Systems for Evaluating Automotive Designs
Presented at the 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility
Portland, OR, USA, Aug. 2006.

Circuit Board Layout for Automotive Electronics
2007 IEEE International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility,
Honolulu, HI, USA, July, 2007.

Electromagnetic Compatibility Presentations

EMI Troubleshooting Using Maximum Radiated Emissions Calculators
Presented at an NEC-sponsored seminar in Austin, TX, August 2009

Estimating the Maximum Radiated Electromagnetic Emissions from Complex Systems
Presented at the EUROEM 2008 conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, July 2008

Building IC Models Based on Measurements and Using These Models Productively
Presented at the 6th International Workshop on the Electromagnetic Compatibility of Integrated Circuits (EMC Compo 07)
Turin, Italy, November 28, 2007

Using Electric and Magnetic "Moments" to Characterize IC Coupling to Cables and Enclosures
Presented at the 6th International Workshop on the Electromagnetic Compatibility of Integrated Circuits (EMC Compo 07) Electromagnetic Compatibility of Integrated Circuits
Turin, Italy, November 28, 2007

Deriving Design Limits using the Expert System Algorithms
Presented at the UMR EMC Consortium Meeting in Rolla, Missouri
November 14, 2007

Essential New Tools for EMC Diagnostics and Testing
presented to the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of the IEEE EMC Society,
Santa Clara, CA, Sep. 11, 2007.

Non-Ideal Behavior of Components
Global University presentation at the 2007
International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility, Honolulu, HI, July 16, 2007.

Lightning and Lightning Protection
Presented to students at Clemson University, July 2007

Things Every Electrical Engineer Should Know about EMC
Lecture at Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, Oct. 30, 2006.

Estimating Unintentional Electromagnetic Emissions from Printed Circuit Board Designs

Printed Circuit Board Decoupling

Detection of Electronic Devices Based on Their Unintended Electromagnetic Emissions

(last update: November 7, 2009 )

Contact Us

If you have comments or suggestions, please contact us at CVEL-L@clemson.edu.