Characterization of the rectification behaviour of in-amps and estimating the near field coupling from SMPS circuits to a nearby antenna using dipole moments

This thesis discusses two parts. In the first part, the rectification behavior of popular instrumentation amplifiers is measured in both common mode and single-ended RF noise injection. It is recommended that AD8221 be used in common mode RF noise injection environment. And AD8220 and AD8429 are recommended in single-ended RF noise injection environment. The mechanism of RF noise rectification inside in-amps is also discussed. It is verified that rectification mainly happens at the non-inverting input of two op-amps in the first stage of an in-amp. The DC voltage difference between inverting input and non-inverting input of the in-amp is further amplified, which will cause a large DC offset at the output. It is shown that symmetry of the first stage in an instrumentation amplifier is very important. The asymmetry of the first stage will increase the DC offset at the output dramatically. The layout of gain resistor should be symmetric to reduce DC offset at the output. In the second part, the near field coupling from SMPS circuits to a nearby antenna is studied using dipole moments. The dipole moments are extracted from scanned H fields on a plane above SMPS circuits, and then imported into an HFSS model to do full wave simulation. The simulated coupling matches well with direct measurement. Methods to resolve magnitude and phase of near fields of SMPS noise source are also introduced --Abstract, page iii

An EMI characterization and modeling study for consumer electronics and integrated circuits

“As internet-of-things (IoT) applications surge, wireless connectivity becomes an essential part of the network. Smart home, one of the most promising application scenarios of IoT, will improve our life quality enormously. However, electromagnetic interference (EMI) to the receiving antenna, either from another electronic product or from a module/an integrated circuit(IC) inside the same wireless device, will degrade the performance of wireless connectivity, thus influencing the user experience. Characterization and modeling of the EMI become increasingly important. In the first part, an improved method to extract equivalent dipoles from magnitude- only electromagnetic-field data based on the genetic algorithm and back-and-forth iteration algorithm is proposed. The method provides an automatic flow to extract the equivalent dipoles from electromagnetic-field data on arbitrarily shaped scanning surfaces and minimizes the number of extracted dipoles. In the second part, both the differential mode (DM) and common mode (CM) EMI below 1 MHz from the ac-dc power supply in a LED TV is analyzed and modeled. Through joint time-frequency analysis, the drain-to-source voltage of the power MOSFET in the power factor correction (PFC) converter is identified as the dominant noise source of both CM and DM EMI below 1 MHz from the power supply. The current paths of DM and CM EMI are explained and modeled by a linear equivalent circuit model. In the last part, the noise source and current path of the conducted CM EMI noise from a Qi-compliant wireless power transfer (WPT) system for mobile applications are analyzed. The analysis and modeling explain the mechanism of the CM EMI noise and provide guidelines to reduce the CM EMI noise”--Abstract, page iv