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Sensing: Five-minute sensor coil design

Inductive Sensing: Five-minute sensor coil design

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Inductive Sensing: Five-minute sensor coil design

Ben
Kasemsadeh

Sep 17 2014 11:30 AM

Comments 0

Did you know you
can design a PCB coil for inductive sensing in five minutes with
WEBENCH®?

If you are
considering using an inductance-to-digital converter, like the
LDC1000, but are concerned about the time
it takes to design a sensor coil, have a look at WEBENCH® Inductive Sensing
Designer.

WEBENCH
Inductive Sensing Designer is an online tool that designs sensor coils for many
inductive sensing applications in just five minutes. The finished coil can then
be manufactured and connected to an inductive sensing evaluation board for
prototyping. After the prototype stage, the coil design can be copied to the
main PCB artwork.

To design a coil
in WEBENCH, you can follow a simple 3-step approach: input your system
requirements, select an auto-generated coil and export it to your preferred PCB
layout software.

1.  Input
system requirements.

Suppose you want
to design the smallest possible coil on a 4-layer PCB that can measure a 10cm
stainless steel target with 5μm resolution at up to 2cm distance between the
target and the sensor coil. You can insert these requirements into the
‘Requirements and Conceptual Diagram’ panel. You can even pre-filter the results
in the filter panel if you’d like.

Remember that
the maximum target distance at a given resolution varies with coil diameter. To
learn more about maximum target distance, check out this blog post: Top three LDC1000 questions.

2.
Review simulated performance of the auto-generated coils and select the best
match for your system.

After clicking
the 'Recalculate’ button, WEBENCH shows eight solutions that meet the system
requirements. The tool calculates many coil parameters automatically, including
number of turns per layer, coil inductance, and simulated resolution. It also
suggests a sensor capacitor value. You don’t have to use the suggested sensor
capacitor value, but the simulation curves on the ‘Charts’ screen shown below
are based on the suggested value

You can sort the
results by coil diameter and select the smallest 4-layer PCB. In this example,
WEBENCH shows that the smallest is ‘PCB inductor coil 6’: a 3cm diameter coil
with 69 turns per layer and a free field inductance of 830μH.

After clicking
the 'Open Design' button of the chosen coil, you can review simulation plots (Rp
vs. distance, inductance vs. distance and resolution vs. distance) and operating
values. For convenience, WEBENCH also shows schematics, bill of materials and a
preview image of the coil.

If the chosen
coil does not suit your needs, you have the option of clicking on the ‘back’
button and selecting another coil.

3.
Export the coil to your favorite PCB layout software.

If you are happy
with the design, simply click on the 'CAD File Export' button. Five common PCB
CAD tools output formats are available:

I exported the
coil to Altium designer. This is what the PCB project looks like in
Altium:

WEBENCH is a
powerful online tool that generates inductive sensing coils in only five
minutes. It greatly reduces prototyping and development time for most inductive
sensing systems.

Additional
resources:

Learn more
about inductive
sensing.

Get started
with WEBENCH Inductive Sensing
Designer.

Read more
inductive sensing blogs, including
how to use a 2-mm by 2-mm PCB inductor as a
sensor and how to use inductive sensing for linear position
sensing.

Search for
answers and get help with your inductance-to-digital converter design in
our Inductive Sensing
forum.

Check out
additional tools in the WEBENCH Design
Center.

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$post.CommentCount)

Sensor
Products, Inductance-to-digital
converter, inductive
sensing, LDC,
LDC1000,
Inductance
to Digital Converter, sensing

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