2017 2nd International Conference on Frontiers of Sensors Technologies

Low Cost Planar Coil Structure for Inductive Sensors to Measure Absolute Angular
Position

Battu Prakash Reddy, Ashwin Murali, Ganesh Shaga

Microsemi India Pvt. Ltd.
Hyderabad, India
e-mail: prakash.battu@microsemi.com, ashwin.murali@microsemi.com, ganesh.shaga@microsemi.com

Abstract—There are many applications that need to sense PCBs (printed circuit board) with inductive coil traces
angular displacement/position, such as automotive electronic have been used in inductive sensors because it is cost
steering system, throttle and brake pedal position, motors, effective to design coil layouts compared to traditional axial
robotic arm, etc. Contactless sensors are becoming increasingly windings on a ferro-magnetic core. Planar windings have
popular in these kinds of applications due to their robustness, been designed in PCBs in earlier work [1]-[7]. Unlike most
reliability and longevity. The paper proposes a new contactless of these coil designs, the coil structure proposed in this paper
variable reluctance (VR) resolver that can be built on a PCB as can be etched on a single layer of a PCB. The rotating target
coil traces. The coil layout consists of an excitation coil and two is a disk made from thin sheet of metal. This reduces the
sense coils laid on a single plane of a PCB. A circular metallic
total cost of the system and allows easy scalability.
disk with a sector aperture alters the induced voltage in the
The design described in [4] requires a slotted target, has 4
sense coils. The induced voltage in the sense coils is a sine and
cosine function of the angular position of disk. The absolute primary windings in sinusoidal arrangement, with two
angular position can be measured with high resolution based secondary windings. The primary windings are sinusoidally
on sense coil voltages. The design is validated using an ASIC to arranged, while the sense coils are arranged in the periphery.
process the sensor signals and compute the angular position. In the design described in this paper, the primary windings
The linearity of the coil design has been validated through are arranged in periphery.
experimental results. It is possible to design a linear position sensor based on
inductive sensing coils and these are described in [6] and [8].
Keywords-position sensor; VR resolver; planar sensor; While the designs described in these papers use a target with
inductive sensor, contactless sensor coils on a PCB, the design described in this paper
corresponds to a rotary position sensor whose target is a solid
I. INTRODUCTION conducting metal plate.
The design suggested in [9] has four terminals, with
The reliability requirements of position sensing systems windings of one line adjacent to each other and with the
are stringent in some industries. While potentiometers offer a exciter coil forming a spiral under the sensing coils. The
relatively inexpensive solution, they are susceptible to the moving target used in the design is a circular PCB with
effects of tough environmental conditions and can fail due to copper bars on the periphery. The design described in this
wear and tear effects. These problems have been overcome paper has windings of one sense coil opposite to each other,
by non-contact sensors. Non-contact sensors are based on thus exhibiting better symmetry. It also has one end of each
inductive, capacitive, optical, hall effect or magneto-resistive coil connected to ground, and the exciter coil runs on the
principles. Optical sensors face problems from dust, periphery of the four sense coils. The moving target used in
lubricant etc, while hall effect sensors may not work in an this design is circular and not rectangular.
environment with disturbance from stray magnetic fields. The design described in this paper has been tested with
Inductive position sensors are immune to magnetic and Microsemi LX3301A inductive sensor interface device [10].
environmental conditions.. The device integrates an oscillator circuit for excitation,
The inductive position sensor or resolver comprises of demodulation circuit with anti-aliasing filter and phase
one or more excitation coils, and multiple sensing coils. The detection to process sensed sine and cosine signals. The
excitation coils are excited, and a voltage is induced in the built-in 32 bit processor computes the angle based on sine
sense coils due to mutual magnetic coupling. A conductive and cosine signals.
target that is positioned near the excitation and sense coils
can change this mutual magnetic coupling relative to the II. SENSOR DESIGN AND OPERATION
position of the rotatable target. This can result in a change in
The operating principle of proposed planar angular
the induced voltage in the sensing coils. This time varying
position sensor is the same as that of a Variable Reluctance
voltage within the sensing coils can be measured and
processed to determine the angular position of the target. As resolver (VR resolver). The structure consists of an
the sensing principle is based on high frequency, stray excitation coil and two sensor coils formed by planar
magnetic fields will not impact position measurement. structure on a PCB. The structure also consists of a circular
rotatable inductive coupling element comprising a sector

978-1-5090-4860-1/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE 

aperture. The rotatable inductive coupling element is external disturbance. The resultant voltage in each of sense
positioned in overlying relation to the planar excitation coil coils SC1 and SC2 is zero.
and separated by an air gap. The inductive coupling element When a sheet conducting material is introduced in to the
can be any conducting material such as copper, aluminum or time varying magnetic field generated by the excitation coil,
iron. eddy currents are induced in the conducting material. Also,
The excitation coil is wound in a planar circular manner according to the electromagnetic wave propagation theory,
with one or more turns. The sensor coils SC1 and SC2 are the electromagnetic wave can be reflected by the metallic
positioned within the excitation coil as shown in fig. 1. Each disk. These two effects will dampen the magnetic flux
of the two sensor SC1 and SC2 coils has clockwise winding flowing into the sense coils in the region where the
portions C1+ and C2+ placed diametrically opposite to a conducting material is placed and reduce induced voltage.
counter-clockwise winding portions C1- and C2-. The sensor
coils can have one or more number of turns on each of the
clock wise and counter-clock wide directions. But the
number of turns on clockwise winding should be equal to
those on counter-clock wise winding.

Figure 3. Angular position measurement setup – three dimensional view.

Figure 1. Coil layout.

Figure 4. Angular position measurement setup – two dimensional view.

For the proposed angular position measurement system, a

conducting sheet in circular form (disk) with a sector
aperture (1/4th of the disk cut out) is used as shown in fig. 2.
This disk, hereupon called target, is attached to a shaft whose
angular position has to be measured and placed on top of coil
Figure 2. Circular disk with a sector aperture – one quarter cut out.
assembly concentric to the excitation coil as shown in fig. 3
When an alternating current of sufficiently high and fig. 4. When the target is at 00 position as shown in
frequency, greater than 1 MHz, is injected into the excitation figure, the conducting portion of the target covers C1+ and
coil, it generates a time varying magnetic field. As the sensor C1- equally and the resultant voltage in SC1 is zero. But for
coils are placed within the excitation coil on the same plane, SC2, C2- is completely covered by metal sheet and C2+
the time varying magnetic field induces voltage in the sense completely uncovered. This will result in the voltage in C2+
coils due to mutual coupling. The sense coils are being higher than C2- and SC2 will have effective positive
geometrically placed in such a way that the mutual coupling voltage (in phase with excitation coil voltage). Hence at 00
is same for both the sense coils and for clockwise and position, SC1 has zero voltage and SC2 has maximum
counter-clockwise portion for each coil. Due to this, the positive voltage.
amount of voltage induced in clockwise and counter- The excitation source injects high frequency current in to
clockwise portion cancel out each other when there is no the excitation coil. The peak amplitude of the high frequency


current is controlled through the source. If Imax is the peak The coil assembly and the demodulation circuit to
amplitude of the exciter current, and ω is the frequency of compute angle from the sense coil voltages is implemented
current in the exciter coil, then the exciter current is on a two layer PCB. The excitation and sense coils are laid
expressed as on the top layer and bottom layer is used only for routing the
coil terminals to the demodulation circuit as shown in fig. 6.
IE = Imax * sin (ωt) (1) Fig 7 shows the PCB fabricated with the coil layout
The voltage induced in the sensor is represented by (2), described in the previous section.
where M is the mutual inductance between the sense coil and
the exciter coil, and θ is the angular position of the target
disk. By replacing the exciter current in (2) with (1), we get
(3).

(2)
VSC = M * ω * Imax * cos (ωt) (3)
The mutual inductance of the sense coils is a function of
the angular position of the target. This is represented as
shown in (4) and (5).
VSC1 = M sinθ * ω * Imax * cos (ωt) (4) Figure 7. PCB fabricated for angular position sensing with parts populated.

VSC2 = M cosθ * ω * Imax * cos (ωt) (5) The Microsemi LX3301A inductive sensor interface
device is used to source the currents through excitation coil
As the target rotates, the voltage induced in sense coils and demodulate the voltage signals from sense coils. The
changes as a sinusoidal and co-sinusoidal function of target excitation coils circuit is based on cross coupled LC
angular position as shown in fig. 5. oscillator that uses two inductors and two capacitors. The
two inductors of the LC oscillator are formed by the
excitation coil and capacitors are soldered on the board to get
required resonant frequency. A metallic disc with a thickness
of 0.2mm with a cut-out sector aperture is used as a target.
Table 1 lists the coil parameters and values.
LX3301A uses analog frontend as shown in figure to
demodulate the resonant frequency signal from sense coils
using phase detection. The demodulated wave is then passed
through ADC and processed by a built-in 32 bit MCU to
compute the angle. The internal DAC in the ASIC converts
the computed angle into analog voltage that varies from 0V
to 5V for 00 to 3600 of angular position. The block diagram
of the LX3301A is shown in fig. 8. The schematic of the
device with the coils is shown in fig. 9.
Figure 5. Voltage induced in sense coils.

III. IMPLEMENTATION

Figure 6. PCB layout of the angular position measurement setup. Figure 8. Block Diagram of LX3301A.


 position by 30 and data is collected at each position. The
collected data includes the sine and cosine signal magnitude
from ADC, reference angular position and measured angular
position. The data is collected by using SENT protocol
feature available in LX3301A. Fig. 11 shows the coil
voltages as observed at the ADC inputs and Fig. 12 shows a
graphical representation of test data collected using the
SENT protocol, where the demodulated sine and cosine
waves are shown in blue and green, while the calculated
rotor position is shown in pink.

Figure 9. Schematic of the sensing circuit.

A
B

Figure 11. Coil voltage waveforms observed on scope – inset shows the
Figure 10. Stepper motor based setup to provide controlled angular high frequency excitation waveforms and the corresponding coil voltages.
position – (A) is the PCB with coils, (B) is the platform on which the target
is placed and (C) is the stepper motor which produces controlled angular TABLE I. COIL PARAMETERS
displacement.
Parameter Value
Excitation coil diameter 45mm
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
Sense coil diameter 15mm
The setup depicted in fig. 10 is used to validate the coil Resonant frequency 3.2 MHz
design. It contains a stepper motor to produce controlled Target diameter 45mm
angular position. The stepper motor increments the angular Target distance (airgap) 10 mm

Figure 12. Data collected from the LX3301A device – SC2 (green), SC1 (blue) and angle plots (pink).


 Testing the Invariance on Angular Displacement," 2009 Third
V. CONCLUSION International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications,
Athens, Glyfada, 2009, pp. 100-104. doi:
A low cost scalable planar coil structure is proposed for 10.1109/SENSORCOMM.2009.24
measuring absolute angular position. The proposed coil [5] S. M. Djuric, "Performance Analysis of a Planar Displacement Sensor
layout is implemented on a two layer PCB and a thin disk of With Inductive Spiral Coils," in IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, vol.
steel is used as target. An inductive sensor interface device 50, no. 4, pp. 1-4, April 2014. doi: 10.1109/TMAG.2013.2288273
from Microsemi is used to validate the proposed design. The [6] B. Aschenbrenner and B. G. Zagar, "Analysis and Validation of a
experimental results show that the coil structure exhibits Planar High-Frequency Contactless Absolute Inductive Position
Sensor," in IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement,
linear response to position variation. vol. 64, no. 3, pp. 768-775, March 2015. doi:
10.1109/TIM.2014.2348631
REFERENCES
[7] Q. Tang, D. Peng, L. Wu and X. Chen, "An Inductive Angular
[1] Baschirotto, E. Dallago, P. Malcovati, M. Marchesi and G. Venchi, Displacement Sensor Based on Planar Coil and Contrate Rotor," in
"Development and comparative analysis of fluxgate magnetic sensor IEEE Sensors Journal, vol. 15, no. 7, pp. 3947-3954, July 2015. doi:
structures in PCB technology," in IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, 10.1109/JSEN.2015.2404349
vol. 42, no. 6, pp. 1670-1680, June 2006. doi: [8] B. Wang, K. H. Teo and P. Orlik, "An accurate contactless position
10.1109/TMAG.2006.873306 sensor with planar resonators," 2016 IEEE SENSORS, Orlando, FL,
[2] S. Duric, L. Nad, B. Biberdzic, M. Damnjanovic and L. Zivanov, USA, 2016, pp. 1-3. doi: 10.1109/ICSENS.2016.7808939
"Planar inductive sensor for small displacement," 2008 26th [9] Z. Zhang, F. Ni, Y. Dong, C. Guo, M. Jin and H. Liu, "A Novel
International Conference on Microelectronics, Nis, 2008, pp. 345- Absolute Magnetic Rotary Sensor," in IEEE Transactions on
348. doi: 10.1109/ICMEL.2008.4559292 Industrial Electronics, vol. 62, no. 7, pp. 4408-4419, July 2015. doi:
[3] M. Rahal and A. Demosthenous, "An ASIC Front End for Planar 10.1109/TIE.2014.2387794
High-Frequency Contactless Inductive Position Sensors," in IEEE [10] LX3301A | Microsemi. Available:
Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, vol. 58, no. 9, pp. http://www.microsemi.com/existing-parts/parts/136315#overview
3021-3030, Sept. 2009. doi: 10.1109/TIM.2009.2016819
[4] S. M. Djuric, L. Nagy and M. Damnjanovic, "Inductive Displacement
Sensor for Force Measuring in Humanoid Robotic Application: