When your Printed Circuit Board (PCB) fails EMC tests, often the problem is not one big issue, but the compounding of many poor design choices.
The problem is not that you lack the skills, but that you don't yet know how to apply them.
Many institutions provide great fundamentals in physics, electronics, and electromagnetism.
The difficult part is making sense of these fundamentals in the real world, especially in hardware design.
When you start designing PCBs, you rely on the simplifications of circuit schematics, and your layout becomes a mirror of them.
The problem is that the schematic does not tell you much about the hidden behaviors of the signals, the traces, and the components.
In fact, the most difficult part for me was understanding that in schematics we talk in terms of voltages and conduction current, while in PCB layout we have to think in terms of electromagnetic fields and be aware of the displacement current.
The interesting part is that once you bridge the gap between theory and practice, your designs get closer and closer to being bulletproof.
This is also when you realize that EMC is not black magic, and the fundamentals were already there - you just needed to assemble the puzzle to make it work.
Dario
Comments