Sponsored by the IEEE EMC Society, it's always a good show to attend. Tektronix is now sponsoring our very popular Designing For EMC seminar. This is not just another EMC seminar, but rather two days focused on design issues facing the designers of high performance electronics. According to one industry source, in 1980 less than half the electronic enclosures were made of plastic. By 1985, over two thirds were plastic.
Plastic offers many advantages for modern electronic systems.
Plastic, however, is transparent to electromagnetic energy, so absolutely no shielding is provided by plastic enclosures. Unfortunately, most electronic systems today need at least some shielding. It's commonly needed to contain energy to meet FCC or VDE emission requirements. Shielding may also be needed to protect against external threats, such as strong electromagnetic fields from nearby hand held radios or cellular telephones, or against the fields caused by nearby electrostatic discharges. In this latter case, we've seen radiated ESD cause problems up to 20 feet away, a sneaky problem indeed.