3. Representativeness trap

Every EMC engineer has at some point been confronted with the idea of designing a test to be "representative" of the actual application. This idea is illusory, and paradoxically, such attempts do not generally lead to robust solutions.

We can simply model the failure of EMC electronics using a resistance-stress diagram. The variation in the response of the electronics to noise is distributed according to a probability starting at the lowest levels that cause a malfunction, up to the level at which the electronics are certain to fail. The distribution curve of the probability of failure is shown in Figure 2 .