Towards Realistic Test Levels for Bulk Current Injection up to 6 GHz Filip Vanhee, Davy Pissoort, Johan Catrysse KHBO – K.U. Leuven Association Zeedijk 101, B8400 Oostende, Belgium filip.vanhee@khbo.be davy.pissoort@khbo.be johan.catrysse@khbo.be Georges Gielen, Guy Vandenbosch K.U. Leuven Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, 3001 Heverlee, België georges.gielen@esat.kuleuven.be guy.vandenbosch@esat.kuleuven.be Abstract— Due to the increasing clock frequencies and decreasing rise times, the mandatory upper frequency limit for radiated emission and susceptibility testing on electronic modules are increasing up to 3 or even 6 GHz. The Bulk Current Injection test method has widely gained acceptance as alternative immunity test method. Unfortunately, test levels for this test method are only available up to 400 MHz. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a theoretical model based on antenna reciprocity that can be used to predict the worst-case current that is induced into a typical Bulk Current Injection set-up by an incoming plane wave. Bulk Current Injection, radiated immunity, antenna reciprocity I. INTRODUCTION Over the last decades, Bulk Current Injection (BCI) has widely gained acceptance as an alternative or supplementary method for testing the radiated susceptibility of electronic modules. The idea behind BCI is to simulate external, unwanted electromagnetic fields impinging lupon cabling that is most often routed closely to a ground plane, e.g. a chassis. Not surprisingly, it has been standardized by several organizations for a variety of applications ranging from integrated circuits up to subassemblies for automotive or aerospace applications. Its main advantage is that it is a relatively cheap method that is well repeatable and easy to set up. Although the mandatory upper frequency limits for radiated emission and immunity testing are rapidly increasing up to 3 or even 6 GHz, very little information is available about realistive BCI test levels at such high frequencies. For example, in military and automotive standards limits for BCI are only given up to 200 or 400 Mhz. Only in IEC 62132-3 [1] (BCI for integrated circuits), informative severity limits are given up to 1GHz. But these are taken from the automotive standard for electronic subassemblies [2] and have a constant test level across the entire frequency range. In [3], [4], some indications are already given by means of simulations and measurements that extending the constant limit up to high frequencies might mean that one is overstressing the electronic module under test. Especially in the early years of BCI, some papers have addressed the equivalence between radiated and injected immunity testing, e.g. [5]. However, these papers also only give results up to 200 or 400 MHz. Moreover, the theoretical model that is used doesn‟t take into account all high-frequency effects. In this paper, equivalent worst-case BCI test levels are investigated up to 6 GHz by means of Method-of-Moments (MoM) simulations (NEC-Win Professional [6]) of the BCI set-up combined with a post-processing step based on the reciprocity that exists between a radiating and a receiving antenna. This paper is organized as follows. Section II summarizes the BCI test levels that are available in standards nowadays. Section III details the theoretical background of the proposed methodology based on antenna reciprocity. Section IV is devoted to the simulation results. Finally, Section V draws concluding remarks. Fig. 1: MIL-STD-461F CS114 calibration limits II. EXISTING BCI TEST LEVELS A. Military Standards As mentioned above, very little information for BCI limit levels above 400MHz is available. In the military standard MIL-STD-461F [7], the maximum frequency is even only 200MHz (Fig. 1). Different severity levels are defined. In Table I the correlation between the radiated and conducted limit curves for this military standard is illustrated for the different application classes. It can be seen that for the