Abstract
Miniaturization and on-chip integration are major lines of research in many branches of science and technology developments, undoubtedly in sensor technology. Fluxgate magnetometers are very sensitive, and accurate magnetic sensors able to detect weak fields both AC and DC, which in recent years saw a great effort in minimizing their dimensions, weight, and power consumption. The physics behind the fluxgate principle is rather complex and makes simulations difficult and only partially used in the literature. The limited physical access to micro sensors for measurements and the need to optimize the entire integrated system, including the sensor geometry and the excitation and readout circuits, make numerical analyses particularly useful in the design of miniaturized sensors. After a thorough review of the miniaturized solutions proposed so far, the present paper examines in detail the possibility of adopting a model based approach for designing miniaturized fluxgate sensors. The model of the fluxgate effect of two different technologies proposed in the literature has been implemented to benchmark simulation results with real data. In addition to the advantages for an optimized design, the implementation and computational challenges of the numerical analyses are precisely outlined.
Highlights
Magnetometers are sensors that allow for measuring external magnetic field and electric currents flowing into a conductor
The design of miniaturized Fluxgate Sensors (FS) would, instead, greatly benefit of numerical analyses: on the one hand, because of the limited accessibility for performing measurements on small prototypes and, on the other hand, the possibility to carry out precise optimization by conducting a thorough evaluation of the performances as function of the various parameters in order to maximize sensitivity and linear range, while minimizing power consumption and noise without the need to produce expensive and time consuming prototypes prior to design finalization
The coils and the core of miniaturized FSs are manufactured with PCB technology [23,25,27,33,35,38,39,40,41], allowing the construction sensors of several tens of millimeters or with different CMOS-compatible MEMS techniques [20,22,24,26,28,29,30,32,36,37], such as sputtering, electroplating, lithography, electron-beam evaporation, etc., which allow for achieving a further reduction in dimensions up to few millimeters
Summary
Magnetometers are sensors that allow for measuring external magnetic field and electric currents flowing into a conductor. Magnetic sensors based on the Hall and magnetoresistance effect are the most widespread, together with the so-called Fluxgate Sensors (FS), which are exceeded only by SQUIDs in terms of resolution Their high sensitivity, high accuracy, temperature stability, and robustness [1,2,3,4,5] make them one of the best candidate to be applied in many fields such as astrophysics and satellite attitude control [6,7,8,9], geophysics [10], electronic compasses [11,12,13], current sensors [14,15], nondestructive testing [16,17], bio-medical diagnostics [18,19], etc.
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