Sensor saturation effects on NLTS measurements [of magnetoresistive sensors]

The effects of sensor saturation on measurements of nonlinear transition shift (NLTS) are compared for the harmonic elimination and extracted dibit methods. The error in the fifth harmonic method is sensitive to the normalized pulse width and to the amount of saturation; the NLTS measured by this technique underestimates the actual NLTS value, and the reduction can be more than 30% for reasonable values of PW/sub 50//T and sensor saturation. The NLTS calculated from the /spl epsiv//sub 1/ echo in the extracted dibit method is relatively insensitive to the amount of saturation, with errors typically less than 5%.