Outline of the measures for mitigating interference

— 1. Electromagnetic compatibility

1.1 Introduction and brief history

Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) has been playing a major role in the strategies and management of almost all industrial sectors over the past few years, following the massive deployment of electronics. Electromagnetic compatibility refers to the fitness of a device to function satisfactorily in its electromagnetic environment without producing intolerable electromagnetic disturbances in other devices in that environment. Problems with electromagnetic disturbance actually started when radio transmissions began, with Guglielmo Marconi. Transmitters, receivers and antennas were not very sophisticated at that time.

The first articles about EMC began to appear in specialized journals towards the year 1920, but it was only during the Second World War, when radios and radar equipment became widespread, that researchers began to study the phenomenon owing to the problems caused by disturbance. A solution was temporarily found by allocating different frequency bands to the various systems. But just ten years later, when the first transistors appeared on the market (fig. 3a), in the sixties when integrated circuits started to become available (fig. 3b) and lastly, when microprocessors (fig. 3c) came on the scene, the problem cropped up again but was much more serious.

Figure 1: Original prototype of the radio wave detector that Guglielmo Marconi used in 1902 on board the cruiser Carlo Alberto.

Figure 2: Marconi inaugurates Radio Vaticana in the presence of Pope Pius XI (1931) a)

b)

c)