Measurement of magnetic fields radiated from ESD using field sensors

The goal of this paper is to show that commercial sensors, whose frequency response is not specifically designed, can be effectively used to measure very fast transient fields applying a proper reconstructing procedure based on the knowledge of the sensor transfer function. To do this, it is necessary to characterize a structure supporting a transverse electromagnetic (TEM) field, that will be used to set up a calibration procedure for elementary magnetic field sensors. The approach is completely analytical and allows us to know rigorously the field inside the structure. From the knowledge of this field, the transfer function of the sensor, in amplitude and phase, is evaluated up to 2 GHz. The complete characterization of the sensor allows us to reconstruct the sensed field from its output voltage waveform. The calibration procedure is carried out in time domain and therefore the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm is used to achieve the sensor transfer function, as well as an inverse FFT (IFFT) is necessary to retrieve the transient impinging field. An experimental validation of the procedure shows the consistency of the approach.