A review of EMI shielding and suppression materials

The effect of growth of the electronics industry and the widespread use of electronic equipment in communications, computation, automation, biomedicine, space and other areas has led to many electromagnetic interference (EMI) problems for the designers as their systems/subsystems operate in close proximity. It is likely to become more severe in the future, unless designers follow EMI control methodology/techniques to meet the EMC requirements during the design stage itself. The elimination or suppression of EMI should be a prime objective of the designer. In this paper the authors have made an attempt to present technical data/details of various EMI suppression materials/devices available in the market and simplified the job of designers in verifying different catalogues which may be directly applied to the problem and harden the system/subsystem in compliance with EMC standards. As the design and development proceeds, the number of available noise reduction techniques also decreases and at the same time the cost of the mitigating noise goes up. Hence selecting the right component at the right time is essential. This paper gives a quick reference to the designer to reduce the noise at source level in the system during the design and development stages by choosing the appropriate component/device and fixing it correctly into the problem.