Development and comparative analysis of fluxgate magnetic sensor structures in PCB technology

In this paper, we present a family of fluxgate magnetic sensors on printed circuit boards (PCBs), suitable for an electronic compass. This fabrication process is simple and inexpensive and uses commercially available thin ferromagnetic materials. We developed and analyzed the prototype sensors with software tools based on the finite-element method. We developed both singleand double-axis planar fluxgate magnetic sensors as well as front-end circuitry based on second-harmonic detection. Two amorphous magnetic materials, Vitrovac 6025X (25 mum thick) and Vitrovac 6025Z (20 mum thick), were used as the ferromagnetic core. We found that the same structures can be made with Metglas ferromagnetic core. The double-axis fluxgate magnetic sensor has a sensitivity of about 1.25 mV/muT with a linearity error of 1.5% full scale, which is suitable for detecting Earth's magnetic field (plusmn60 muT full-scale) in an electronic compass