PODCAST EPISODE

								 Judy Warner (00:01.703)
Hi Julianne, thanks so much for joining us today. I'm excited to share you with our audience and talk all about EMI EMC today.

Juliano Mologni (00:09.954)
Yeah, thank you very much for the time, Judy. It's an honor to be here, and I appreciate the opportunity to explain a little bit what we do here at Ansys.

Judy Warner (00:18.391)
Well, I'm sort of a cyber stalker. Hold on a second. I've been sort of a cyber stalker in that you put up the coolest eye candy on LinkedIn. And I wanna make sure and share with our audience because it's so great the visualization that you give on LinkedIn and for civilian non-engineers like me.

it speaks volumes and I think everybody loves it. And so I knew that I wanted to talk to you and get you on and talk more about that. And I know you also just came from an important EMC show. And so I also wanted to talk about that. So why don't you take a moment and tell us a little bit about you, your background and what you do at ANSYS.

Juliano Mologni (01:08.182)
Yeah, sure. So here at Ansys, I'm the lead electronics product manager. So I'm the product manager for some of our high-frequency electromagnetic products. It's basically the tools that companies and users, they use to design ICs, packets, print circuit boards, antennas, radars, anything that is related to electronics at a high frequency, megahertz, gigahertz, up to teraherts. Before I joined Ansys, I used to work for an Ansys channel partner in Brazil.

for 10 years, E-S-S. Before that I used to work from many different companies. Delphi Automotive Systems, Designing Waring Harness, Princequit Boards, Motorola, where I was a package, IC package designer and a few other ones. So it's been a very interesting adventure so far. I think the greatest advantage of being here at Ansys is that we have thousands of customers, over 40,000 customers. So I have the opportunity to work with

companies on the high tech side, on the automotive, aerospace. So I think it's a very good place where I am right now, because I'm always talking to smart people like you, and many of our people here in our audience. And I'm always seeing what's coming up next, what's going to be like 5G, 6G, because people always simulate first before they design an actual physical prototype. So it's been a very interesting journey so far.

Judy Warner (02:17.959)
I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Judy Warner (02:35.579)
I totally resonate with that remark. I've said many times I get to work with some of the smartest people, and also I've had awesome field trips. So that's my two, and it's always changing, right? We're always pushing. So I find it really engaging and interesting. So I share that with you. So let's talk about, I mean, it seems to be a theme with my guests these days of shifting landscapes, right? Because...

higher speed in your case, you know, 5G, now they're starting to flirt with 6G, you know, internet of everything, right? And so, so much is changing so fast. And people are saying the rules of thumb, the old rules of thumb don't always carry forward really well. So what are you seeing in that high frequency space specifically about how engineers sort of

keep up and keep moving with the technology.

Juliano Mologni (03:37.954)
Yeah, that's a very interesting question. And that's something that we're seeing all across the industry.

If you take a look at the simple products like, you know, washing machine or even a light bulb, you know A light bulb is just a light bulb, right? But now they have Wi-Fi Communication sometime you have Zigbee, you know washing machine back, you know 20 years ago You know, it was just like an electromechanical timer and the motor right now you have touchscreen display you have antennas You have wireless communication and now since you are adding that kind of electronic

Judy Warner (04:05.029)
Right.

Juliano Mologni (04:14.312)
connected today, you have to go through a different set of EMC certifications, right? You have a product like a bulb, you know, it's not too bad, but if you have a Wi-Fi antenna then you have to go through lots of certifications, FCC, you know, CE in Europe, and those engineers that were used to design a light bulb now they have to know how to feed an antenna and that's not something very trivial for most of the engineers who are only designing to, you know...

Judy Warner (04:20.724)
Uh...

Judy Warner (04:27.707)
Mm-hmm.

Juliano Mologni (04:41.57)
simple print circuit boards and things like this. Actually, I have a professor of mine, he gave me a very good advice. He was saying that there are only two kinds of engineers, the ones that are facing EMC and signal integrity problems and the ones that are going to face, you know, EMI problems and signal integrity. And he's absolutely right. I mean, you know, I remember when I started with in the simulation world 25 years ago, you know, only high tech companies were using simulation.

But now we have everyone using our tools, you know, on automotive industry appliances, even the most simple IoT devices, you know, they're using simulation because they don't, they want to understand what their products is gonna behave like on EMC certification tests, but they also need to make sure that everything is gonna work as planned, right? You know, you have to match impedance for antennas, you need to make sure, you know, your antenna is not interfering in digital signals and the other way around.

So we're seeing more and more electronics everywhere. So I think that's the challenge that engineers are facing today. They just need to understand more about RF, EMC, signal integrity, power integrity.

Judy Warner (05:55.479)
Yeah, and I've said many times that because I had about a five year stint where I was focused on RF microwave PCBs and how really different they are, you know, and there's things we could do say that were IPC compliant, but we'd still screw up the engineer right because the way down too much copper or the way we drill the vias or, you know, whatever. And I just see this getting.

in some ways across the system worse and worse and worse because you have multiple antennas right and all these chances for interference so what I've observed over the last 10 years is a bunch of engineers being drug into RF kicking and screaming and then trying to catch up and understand and it's and they're doing a great job by the way it's because there are good companies and tools and educational resources that

companies like Ansys provides. So I think that's really, really great. And millimeter wave, you know, I know I talked to a friend from Rogers and he's like, rules of thumb at microwave are different than they are millimeter wave. And so you don't wanna get blindsided, which is why I wanna have you on, right? So our audience goes, got it. You know, I need to pay attention.

Juliano Mologni (07:10.263)
Yes.

Juliano Mologni (07:19.75)
Yeah, absolutely.

Juliano Mologni (07:24.434)
Yeah, before I started with simulation, I was designing print circuit boards. And back at that time, you understand a few things like, you know, currents, you know, resistance, inductance, capacitance. But when you increase in the speed, I mean, it doesn't have to be like millimeter wave, 28 gigahertz. But if you're increasing the speed up to a few gigahertz, you know, you need to understand like reflections, you know, TDR, you know, RF stuff.

And that's a big shift, moving from ILCs to S-parameters, reflections, crosstalk. It's a big shift. For the millimeter wave, for example, it's also very difficult to measure things at 28 gigahertz.

Judy Warner (08:01.659)
Yeah.

Juliano Mologni (08:09.254)
One of the differences between 5G and 4G is that 5G millimeter wave, instead of having just a single antenna, you have an antenna array because you want to focus the energy on the users. So to do that kind of measurement at 28 gigahertz is very difficult. If you go to the FCC website, just search for a given product, you see that they have lots of measurements and even more simulations because they match a few measurements with simulation.

Judy Warner (08:21.42)
Yes.

Juliano Mologni (08:38.578)
radiation pattern of this antenna rays and performing the measurements is very challenging. So simulation helps a lot on that, especially understanding electromagnetics. That's something that we don't see, right? I mean, mechanical, you see something bending, right? But the electromagnetics is different, right? With simulation, actually, you can actually see, visualize electric fields, magnetic fields, and that provides more insight. People understands better when they see fields.

Judy Warner (09:06.139)
Yes, it helps me a lot by looking at your cool posts. I'm like, oh, you know, it's one thing to conceptionally think about a field, right? And it's another thing to sort of visually see how it's emitting, right? Off devices or boards or whatever. It's really cool. So what are engineers? Okay. So I've heard many times.

Juliano Mologni (09:11.315)
Yeah.

Juliano Mologni (09:21.259)
Yes.

Judy Warner (09:34.283)
even in recent podcasts with Eric Bogotan, who I'm sure you know well. And Eric says he hears all the time.

Judy Warner (09:45.787)
Juliana, hold on a second. Your image just disappeared.

Juliano Mologni (09:49.848)
Oh really?

Judy Warner (09:51.775)
Yeah, I think we're having a bandwidth issue. I wonder if it's on my end. I had a little bit of an issue yesterday.

Judy Warner (10:04.351)
Oh, it says recording continues smoothly. Live video will return when their internet approves. Oh well, I guess it's your internet, but it's okay. It says, which I've heard on this platform, it disappeared for me just to save bandwidth, but it's still recording, so we're good. All right, I'm gonna ask that question again. I was on a recent podcast with Eric Bogatyn and Tim Wang-Lee from Keysight, and we were talking about simulation.

Juliano Mologni (10:22.187)
Okay.

Judy Warner (10:33.519)
Right. And we were talking about how people often say, you know what? I don't want to say that, right? They're your competitor. Um, let me do this differently. I'm going to re-ask that question. I can cut all this out. Um, a lot of engineers sort of bulk against expensive simulation tools, but people keep telling me that you. It's

sort of no longer optional. Is that something, is that your perspective and sort of since you meet with so many engineers across the industry, what is your sense about when you get a pushback on the cost of owning really good simulation tools?

Juliano Mologni (11:19.522)
Simulation tools. Yeah, that's a question that we got, especially from small and medium business. I mean, simulation tool, they can be very expensive, but we have many commercial options for that. But

Judy Warner (11:27.104)
Right.

Juliano Mologni (11:34.482)
you know, moving to the cloud, we have elastic license, you have, you can lease like for a month or two, you can even, you know, request a service, you know, we can provide technical service. So you don't need to learn simulation, you know, we can do this work for you. But, you know, what we're seeing more and more is that adoption is increasing a lot. And the reason for that is because simulation, just like, you know, hardware is expensive, but

Judy Warner (11:43.663)
Mm.

Judy Warner (11:50.83)
Oh.

Juliano Mologni (11:58.962)
how expensive it is to a chamber and fail certification, how expensive it is to redo a prototype, not only the physical cost, but you're delaying your product, you know, the launch of your product by weeks, maybe months. How expensive is that? Because your competitors, you know, they're launching on time, right? If you take a look at cell phones, cars in the past, you know, a car, you had a new model year, every five years you have a new model, right? Today, you know, every year you have a new model and how do you think they're doing this, you know,

Judy Warner (12:13.371)
Right.

Juliano Mologni (12:28.598)
just simulation. Without simulation there's no way you can actually decrease the development cycle in order to keep launching products more often.

Judy Warner (12:30.052)
Yeah.

Judy Warner (12:41.027)
Just being the devil's advocate here, if someone say works for a small company, say someone in our audience works for a really small company where they just don't have the spend at this point, or maybe they're a startup, right? What would you recommend? I know there's some maybe open source or low end tools, and I know they don't have the functionality of a tool like Ansys, but.

Let's say that I'm a startup. What would you recommend as an expert in this industry?

Juliano Mologni (13:13.838)
Well, I'll recommend to get in touch with the Ansys startup program. We do have a startup program where we love companies, we love startups, we love to help them.

Judy Warner (13:19.682)
Okay.

Juliano Mologni (13:23.678)
I mean, there are many free tools, but in the end, it's not only a tool. I mean, you're only going to get benefit if someone helps you to use the tool, right? And that's what we do here. We're not only providing you a tool, like we're also teaching you how to use it, you know, how to get benefit from that. So I think that's the biggest difference. You know, there are free tools on the market for everything, but, you know, if you're...

Judy Warner (13:32.473)
Right.

Judy Warner (13:39.047)
Mm.

Juliano Mologni (13:46.442)
they're not going to provide you support. They're not going to teach you how to use it, right? You're going to have to figure that out by yourself. It's going to take some time. So we do have this startup program where we help all the hundreds, thousands of startup companies, I think. And we help them. And when they grow, we become even more.

Judy Warner (13:51.236)
Right.

Juliano Mologni (14:06.722)
partners, you know, we tighten the partnership and we help them grow even more. And having Ansys just like, you know, many of all these companies, you know, as a partnership for startup is also very good because they're trying to get, you know, money, customers, ideas. And having someone like Ansys, you know, you were just mentioning Keysight, you know, all of these companies backing them up is also really good for them. So that's the reason we have this startup program.

Judy Warner (14:14.509)
Mm-hmm.

Judy Warner (14:20.859)
Right.

Judy Warner (14:30.999)
I know, and it can't, I really didn't cue you up to give an answers commercial, but I know that's your sincere answer. And having worked at Altium and we had a university program, I would tell students the same thing. Like when you get a job, you know, rather than eagle, you know, on your resume, to say that you know how to use a professional tool actually helps you on your career path.

And it helps you as a company to have better results. And so, you know, I didn't, I didn't mean for us to sound like a, but I do resonate sincerely with that, having worked for another company with a similar tool and understanding that, you know, using AutoCAD, Eagle, you know, or one of the either in KiCad open source or whatever is great, it'll help you get your senior capstone project done. Or.

If you're a startup, you know, it'll get you off the ground, but then what? So I really, I really do resonate with what you're saying. Um, and a lot of people don't know that companies like answers, all team, keyset, whoever it is, you know, a lot of these companies do have, um, programs for startups and students, right? Which help again, it just helps the whole industry. Yeah. Okay. I.

Juliano Mologni (15:35.809)
Right.

Juliano Mologni (15:53.07)
And yeah, we have academic for universities. And also, anyone can download our high-frequency electromagnetic tools. Any student can actually download that for free with a single click. We provide that as well. But unfortunately, we don't provide support for all the students around the world. But there's an ANSYS forum where from time to time, some of us, we go there and we answer some of the questions.

Judy Warner (16:11.915)
Yeah.

Judy Warner (16:18.783)
Right. And I imagine ANSYS also has some online resources. I didn't look into that ahead of time. I should have asked you. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So they can self-educate and support as much as possible.

Juliano Mologni (16:24.319)
Yes. A lot. Yeah. Many.

Judy Warner (16:35.411)
We've talked about this idea of, um, when it comes to EMC, whack-a-mole, right? You solve one problem and you create another. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what that might look like in the context of EMC?

Juliano Mologni (16:43.382)
Yeah.

Juliano Mologni (16:52.246)
Yes, absolutely. I mean, I've been in the EMC world for several decades now, and I have seen a lot of different and even curious things. One of the things that we see a lot, and I mean a lot, is that in many different companies, you have someone who's designing a PCB, and then you have an engineer who's responsible for the thermal behavior. So if you have to place a heat sink or a cooler, nobody wants to place a cooler because it's very expensive.

Judy Warner (17:17.614)
Mm-hmm.

Juliano Mologni (17:22.272)
you know, increase the weight. And then you have EMC engineers that, you know, they're evaluating the board and they have to go to certification. So one thing that we see a lot is that someone designs a PCB and then there's a thermal problem, right? The PCB is okay, I mean, if you take a look at the electromagnetic compatibility, but there's a thermal problem. And then the engineers say, hey, okay, I'm going to put like a heat sink in here.

Judy Warner (17:24.795)
Right.

Judy Warner (17:44.532)
Mm.

Juliano Mologni (17:46.986)
When they add a heat sink to the print circuit board, you're creating an electromagnetic problem. So you're solving a thermal, but you're creating an EMI problem. And then the other engineer goes, now we're testing this and it's failing. So you have to remove this. So it's kind of like you're fixing the thermal problem, but then you're creating an EMI problem. Same thing happens with connectors, with capacitors. I've seen companies that they were trying to reduce the cost of the product, cost reduction.

Judy Warner (17:52.996)
Yeah.

Juliano Mologni (18:15.394)
programs, they're everywhere, right? So they were just like removing a few comp... this was a radio product, right? So they were removing a few components like chokes and they instead of redoing all the certification tests they just did the check on the audio quality. So the quality of the sound was still good and they removed a component, they multiplied that component value of like a dollar for millions. Hey, I'm gonna save millions. The problem is that

that component was a choke was actually in there to suppress conducted noise. So what happens is that some of the customers later were seeing odd things, right? Because when they were increasing the volume of that radio, things were starting to behave very oddly around it. So customers went back there and they say, yeah, we had this problem. So we're trying to save costs, but in the end, it was a problem. So.

Those kind of things, someone is changing your product and not doing all the tests or creating different problems, we see that all the time, especially when you have multiple physics, mechanical, thermal, electromagnetics. They're usually different engineers, so they don't know what's going to affect the change that they're doing to the product, what that's going to affect on EMC or thermal or mechanical.

Judy Warner (19:22.993)
Yeah.

Judy Warner (19:35.759)
So there's been a lot of talk about sort of a system based thinking, right? And being aware of your corollary stakeholders, which can be challenging. And we've talked forever about these silos. So, you know, what practical advice can you give engineers to sort of think about all those things instead of throwing their one piece over the wall and creating another problem and all this back and forth? Like.

Juliano Mologni (19:41.634)
Yes.

Judy Warner (20:06.567)
you know, what about reliability over time? Like...

Juliano Mologni (20:07.829)
S.

yet.

And as you're saying, it's a system. It's part of a company. If you ask an engineer to learn electromagnetics, thermal, mechanical, I mean, it's very challenging. So what we are seeing more and more is actually companies creating automated workflows. So if you're making a change to your product, you have to rerun those tests. It doesn't have to be simulation. It could be a physical test. But the simulation, it's easier because you can upload your changes to somewhere

Judy Warner (20:34.31)
Mm.

Juliano Mologni (20:41.676)
of a company and you know you can run simulations in the background in an automated way and get a report like hey the change that you did does not affect EMC for example right so that's something that we're seeing more and more because EMC certification is just the first step right you know you can pass EMC but you can still have a problem in the field

Judy Warner (20:46.619)
Right.

Judy Warner (20:50.531)
Mm.

Juliano Mologni (21:01.918)
right? I mean, those are things that we see more usually on automotive. You see those recalls, nobody wants to see that. I mean, those are certified products, but they are failing on the field. So, as you're saying, one of the things that we have is something that we call product reliability. So, you have a print circuit board, you have the thermal profile, you have the electromagnetic profile,

Judy Warner (21:09.615)
Right. Yeah.

Juliano Mologni (21:26.89)
And then the currents are going up and down all the time. You have high speed current switching very fast. And that's, along the years, is going to create problems, thermal stresses, fatigue. And that's something that we can actually compute the mean time between failures. With this thermal profile, in this behavior, you're going to place this, let's say, in a car that's going to drive, I don't know, 100 miles per day on a bumpy road.

Judy Warner (21:47.129)
Mm.

Juliano Mologni (21:56.434)
six years or just gonna last like five years. Yeah, so this is different from certification, right? Certification is one thing, the other thing you need to know is, you know, how long my product is gonna last, you know, in a given environment, you know, it could be in an airplane, in an automobile, you know, you don't know. So, you know, predict the environment where your product is gonna operate, it really helps.

Judy Warner (21:58.611)
I see.

Judy Warner (22:09.136)
Mm-hmm.

Judy Warner (22:18.309)
Mmm.

Judy Warner (22:22.091)
It must be challenging when say with automotive and I know automotive standards are really rough. And so to still see it sort of like what I, the corollary to what I was saying about PCB is they can comply to everything IPC says, but then depending on the environment or, you know, whatever it, you don't have the whole picture. And so, you know,

In case of automotive, you might live in Minnesota or you might live in Arizona, right? It could be under extreme heat or extreme cold or salt on the road or, and same with airplanes going, you know, flying from Arizona, you know, going into high altitudes and moisture and, you know, all these things. So, um...

Juliano Mologni (22:57.026)
Yeah.

Judy Warner (23:16.119)
Again, when I say all that, Giuliano, it sounds like, forget it, I just wanna go home, right? But engineers are so clever. So how, in your mind, do you have any advice as far as how to sort of onboard? Like in other words, if you're designing a part or a system, you're responsible for thermal, like how can the person that's...

doing the thermal modeling say, think about.

the next engineer in line, or the mechanical, or how can we gain this more system-based approach? Do you think these automated workflows are EDA tools, basically is what you're saying, and cloud enabled, right? So is that the best kind of outlook you see for engineers?

Juliano Mologni (24:15.823)
What?

Not for engineers, but for a company. I think for engineers, it's really important for them to be up to date with the experts in the field and what's happening. So for example, I just came back from the IEEE EMC SIPI conference in Grand Rapids, where I can meet the most amazing and most smart guys in the field for EMC and SIPI. When we go to DesignCon, when you go to APAC for power electronics, that I've

Judy Warner (24:27.794)
Mm.

Judy Warner (24:33.2)
Mm-hmm.

Juliano Mologni (24:47.088)
I think if I'm an engineer, I want to know what's happening out there, what I need to learn. I think creating this, being part of this network, watching your podcasts, see the publications in LinkedIn from all the experts that we have out there, I think that's the first step. I mean, you, of course, have to have your background, your theory. You need to understand electromagnetics or thermal, Maxwell's equations, Navier-Stokes.

Judy Warner (25:13.05)
Right.

Juliano Mologni (25:17.008)
But then after you have this background, you need to know what's happening out there. What's going on? And talking to the experts in the field, watching your podcast, going to conference, I think that's the best way to do this, to learn inside, to learn what's happening out there.

Judy Warner (25:23.387)
Right.

Judy Warner (25:31.204)
Just stay up to, yeah.

Yeah, well, that's certainly what I'm aspiring to do here. And why I call it the ecosystem, right? Is getting all different experts like you on is to give more awareness to engineers so they can have that. I think it's for me, at least how I imagine it, unless you think otherwise, it seems like a situational awareness and also the landscape's always changing. Right? So you have to self-educate all the time.

Juliano Mologni (25:39.182)
Yes.

Juliano Mologni (25:46.184)
Yeah.

Juliano Mologni (26:00.374)
Yes.

all the time. An ecosystem is something that we take very seriously. I mean, like, you know, we have integrations within Keysight, PathWave, ADS, or FPro, you can run our tools from there. We have, you know, integration with Altium. We have the same thing with Autodesk and Zouken, because we understand that there are tools everywhere and people are using many different tools, right? So, you know, having this open ecosystem, you know, with Synopsys and all of

Judy Warner (26:26.156)
Right.

Juliano Mologni (26:33.276)
ecosystem, right? And that's what we have to do. We take this very seriously here at Ansys.

Judy Warner (26:34.84)
Right.

Judy Warner (26:40.331)
Well, I really admire ANSYS for that particular reason, right? I think the Dave's of us, um, as companies actually that serve engineers staying in a closed loop, right? I think that as we allow for that integration across multiple tools, I think everybody wins, but specifically engineers win, right? And the world kind of wins because hopefully it gets done right. And so, yeah.

Juliano Mologni (26:43.394)
Yeah.

Juliano Mologni (26:53.398)
Yes.

Judy Warner (27:08.387)
Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thanks so much. And I hope you had a great time at the EMC SIPI conference. I was sort of watching from the sidelines, but it looked like a terrific show. Where would you like our folks to go learn more about ANSYS, maybe some of your educational resources, your forum, and how can they plug in and become part of the ANSYS ecosystem?

Juliano Mologni (27:36.522)
Yeah, that's a very good question. If your ANS is a student, you can just Google ANS as a student and you're going to find our forums where you can download our tools. If you just want to learn more about electromagnetics, you can go to ANS's electronics. We have a web page. If you have questions and you have requests, like rule of thumb, like 3W for crosstalk, I want to see why this is not working anymore, just ask me on LinkedIn.

Judy Warner (28:06.306)
Okay.

Juliano Mologni (28:06.416)
I'm gonna explain that to you. So I'm always open to talk to everyone and I really appreciate this opportunity, Judy. I had a great time in here. It's always great to talk to you and hopefully we can meet again soon.

Judy Warner (28:21.335)
Yes, I hope so. Well, I'm definitely gonna nab you because actually send me a couple of those of your favorite animations and I'll try to integrate them into the video part of this. So our listeners that are people that are watching on YouTube can see how cool they are and I'll definitely put your LinkedIn profile before. So Juliano, thank you so much for all that you do for the industry as well as Ansys. I appreciate your time today and I hope to have you back again soon.

Juliano Mologni (28:31.298)
Sure. Absolutely.

Juliano Mologni (28:40.578)
Ha ha.

Yeah, thank you.

Juliano Mologni (28:50.215)
Sounds great, Judy. Thank you very much. Talk to you soon.

Judy Warner (28:53.695)
Okay, for our listeners, please go check out. I'm after Julianna and I finish here. I'm going to go nab all those links from him and give you a bunch of stuff to plug into. And please come and join our community as well and we're going to do our very best to keep you up to speed and equipped while you're out there doing all your great engineering work. Thanks for joining us today. We'll see you next week. Until then, remember to always stay connected to the ecosystem.

Judy Warner (29:23.972)
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