Vector Magnetic Field Sensing Using Single Phase Magneto-Electric Thin Films

We present the design and experimental implementation of a sensing device for determining the magnitude and direction of low-frequency ac magnetic fields using two identical magneto-electric (ME) thin films. The ME films were fabricated from a single-phase SrCo
$_{2}$
Ti
$_{2}$
Fe
$_{8}$
O
$_{19}$
M-type source and deposited on a 500-nm-thick indium tin oxide layer on a silicon substrate using pulsed laser deposition. The device size (in volume) is 0.02 cm
³
for each ME film, and the proposed experimental setup can be used to detect ac magnetic fields that were generated from a solenoid coil located at a distance of 10 mm. In this article, we also made improvements to our previous H-field sensing circuit that detects the change in capacitance of the ME film when an external field
H $_{\text{ext}}$
is applied. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed vector sensing approach using two ME films can establish the magnitude and angle of external magnetic fields with maximum detection errors of 13% and 16%, respectively.