A Micro Fluxgate Magnetic Sensor Using New Printed Circuit Board Technology

We have developed a micro fluxgate magnetic sensor using new printed circuit board (PCB) technology. The fluxgate sensor consisted of five PCB stack layers including one layer of magnetic core and four layers of excitation and pick-up coils. The center layer as a magnetic core was made of micro patterned amorphous magnetic ribbon with an extremely high DC permeability of ~100,000, and the core had a rectangular ring shape. Four outer layers as an excitation and pickup coils had a planar solenoid structure. The amorphous magnetic core was easily saturated due to the high permeability, low coercive field, and closed magnetic path for the excitation field. The chip size of the fabricated sensing element was 7.3 × 5.7 mm2. Excellent linear response over the range of –100 μT to +100 μT was obtained with sensitivity of 780 V/T at excitation sine wave of 3 Vp-p and 360 kHz. A very low power consumption of ~8 mW was measured. This low power, small size, and high sensitive fluxgate sensor to measure a low magnetic field is very useful for various applications.