Crossfield effect in magnetic sensors

Crossfield effect often seriously limits the accuracy of magnetic sensors. However, this effect is only rarely discussed by sensor manufacturers and users. .In this paper, we present measurements on ring-core, racetrack and Vacquier type fluxgates and on one type of AMR sensor. In the case of fluxgates, crossfield error in the Earth's field can be suppressed by proper design below 15 nT p-p for ringcore sensors and 3 nT p-p for the race-track and rod fluxgates. This means that for many applications the crossfield sensitivity can be neglected. However, in the case of AMR crossfield sensitivity is inherent. Typical high-sensitive sensor exhibits 1000 nT p-p error in the Earth's field. Feedback compensation of the measured field can effectively suppress this error. If feedback compensation is not possible, other methods can be used to suppress this effect, such as an advanced processing of the flipped sensor output.