EMI/EMC Academy ~30 min Interactive

Firmware & System Robustness

Detect and recover: watchdogs, plausibility checks, filtering in software, and the performance criteria that define pass/fail.

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Hardware reduces the RF that reaches the victim; firmware handles what's left. Because RI failures often show as noisy or drifted readings rather than crashes, software plausibility and filtering can lift a design across the line — but only after the hardware has done its job.

Learning objectives. Apply averaging/plausibility checks, watchdogs and recovery; and map behavior to performance criteria A/B/C.
Averaging & plausibility. Oversample and filter sensor inputs; reject out-of-range or impossible readings caused by demodulated RF.
Watchdog & recovery. A watchdog restarts a hung CPU; state machines re-initialize safely so a transient upset self-heals.

Add communication integrity (CRC, retries) so RF-corrupted frames are re-sent, and refresh critical outputs periodically so a glitched register self-corrects. Design so any single upset degrades gracefully and recovers.

As with all immunity tests: A = normal throughout, B = self-recovering degradation, C = needs intervention. For RI, criterion B often means a sensor reading may wobble during exposure but returns to normal afterward — know which your product must meet.

Common mistake: using software averaging to hide a hardware demodulation problem that a cheap input filter would eliminate. Fix the pickup first.