Engineering:EMC-aware programming

Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC)-aware programming involves writing software which is resilient to errors induced by electromagnetic fields.

Motivation

Microcontrollers have low immunity tolerance resulting in a very high rate of transient errors and a potential for processor failure. To improve the immunity towards electromagnetic fields, extra hardware devices are often used. Hardware protection requires additional circuitry which adds cost, weight and size to a device. Many hardware techniques focus only on the prevention or detection of failures and have no means of recovering from these errors once they occur.

The software approach consists in investigating the possibilities of using defensive software techniques as protection against electromagnetic disturbances as it is an economically interesting solution. The same software mechanisms could be used for a wide range of applications and different platforms.

See also

• Don't care alarm
• Emission-aware programming
• Immunity-aware programming
• List of EMC directives
• Radiation hardening
• Soft error

References

• "The EMC Impact of Embedded Software" by Martin O’Hara 2007

"Design for EMC" presentation by Daryl Gerke, PE