IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 45, NO.

6, JUNE 2009 2727

Magnetic Sensor System Using Asymmetric Giant Magnetoimpedance Head

Seok Soo Yoon1 , Pratap Kollu2 , Dong Young Kim1 , Gun Woo Kim1 , Yongjun Cha2 , and CheolGi Kim2
Department of Physics, Andong National University, Andong 760-749, Korea
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Chungnam National University, Daejeon 305-764, Korea

Recently sensitive micro-magnetic sensors are strongly required in various technologies such as BT and IT. This paper gives the com-
prehensive analysis of the Asymmetric Giant MagnetoImpedance (AGMI) sensor’s performance with negative feedback. Asymmetrical
behavior of the GMI is required for linear magnetic field sensors as the sensitivity and linearity for magnetic field are the most important
parameters in the practical application of GMI to magnetic sensors, and this has been realized by magnetic field annealing in amorphous
ribbon. A novel AGMI sensor was developed and the performance of the sensor was carefully studied with and without applying negative
feedback. The sensor uses 10 mm 1 mm 20 m Co66 Fe4 Si15 B15 ribbon as a sensing element. On applying the negative feedback
the sensor shows excellent linearity free from hysteresis, independent of temperature variations. The sensitivity AGMI sensor was found
to be 0.27 V/Oe in dynamic range of 2 2 Oe.
Index Terms—Amorphous soft magnetic ribbon, magnetic sensor, magnetoimpedance, negative feedback.

I. INTRODUCTION II. DEVELOPMENT OF AGMI MAGNETIC SENSOR

HE Giant Magneto Impedance (GMI) effect, the huge
T change of ac impedance of soft magnetic materials upon
application of dc magnetic field, attracts much attention of
research teams all over the world owing to its promising device
applications for extremely sensitive magnetic field sensors (see
[1], [2] and references therein). Circuit designs for magnetic
field sensor based on GMI effect named GMI sensor have been
proposed [3], [4] and commercial products using GMI sensor
have been released by Aichi Micro Intelligent (AMI) Co. The
GMI sensor has both advantageous features of the high sen-
sitivity of the fluxgate sensor and the quick response and low
power consumption of the Hall sensor and the MR sensors [3].
In order to develop linear GMI sensor, asymmetric GMI
(AGMI) characteristic is strongly required because soft mag-
netic materials show generally symmetric dependence on
positive and negative magnetic fields. GMI sensors developed
by AMI Co. are producing bias magnetic field on the amorphous
wire head by applying dc or ac pulse current on the bias coil
wound on the head to obtain asymmetric GMI effect [3]. Re-
cently, a very large asymmetric GMI effect has been observed
and studied in field-annealed [5]–[8] and stress/field-annealed
[9], [10] Co-based amorphous ribbons in air. The asymmetric
GMI effect in the field-annealed amorphous ribbon has self-bi-
ased advantage in constructing linear GMI sensor because
there is no need for external biasing and bias coil to make the
asymmetric GMI. In our previous work we discussed about the
GMI sensor without feedback [11].
In our present work, we developed a linear magnetic sensor
using AGMI effect (AGMI sensor) in the field-annealed amor-
phous ribbon and improved the performance of the AGMI
sensor by applying negative feedback loop for attaining good
linearity without hysteresis and increasing temperature stability.
Manuscript received October 16, 2008. Current version published May 20,
2009. Corresponding author: S. S. Yoon (e-mail: yoon@andong.ac.kr).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMAG.2009.2020538
0018-9464/$25.00 © 2009 IEEE
A. Preparing AGMI Sensing Element
In order to prepare AGMI sensing element, amorphous
ribbons (Allied Signal Co.) of 5 cm length,
2 mm width and 20 thickness were field-annealed during
8 hours in air at 380 with magnetic field of 3 Oe along the
ribbon axis. AGMI sensing elements with small size below
1 cm length were obtained by chemical etching the field-an-
nealed ribbons of 5 cm length in solution. The GMI
ratio profiles of the ribbons were obtained by measuring the
absolute value of impedance using HP4192A impedance
analyzer as function of external magnetic field applied
along the ribbon axis [5], [7]. The GMI ratio is defined as
, where is the
dc resistance of the ribbon.
Fig. 1(a) and (b) show GMI profile at 100 kHz of the
field-annealed ribbons of 5 cm 2 mm and 0.5 cm 1 mm
sizes, respectively. The GMI profile of the ribbon of 5 cm
2 mm size shown in Fig. 1(a) exhibits very asymmetric GMI
effect, so called “GMI-valve” due to step-like change near zero
magnetic field [5]. The GMI profile of Fig. 1(a) shows almost
linear field dependence with sensitivity of about 53%/Oe in
very narrow range. After the size of the ribbon is reduced by
chemical etching, the GMI profile possesses still linear field
dependence in more wider range although the sensitivity is
decreased to about 4.4%/Oe. Hence we could prepare small
AGMI heads for linear magnetic sensor by the field-annealing
and chemical etching.
B. Sensor Circuit Design and Working
We developed AGMI sensor system consists of the field-an-
nealed AGMI sensing element and circuit. The circuit consists
of a oscillator, voltage to current converter for providing the
current to the head, a differential amplifier, multiplier, low pass
filter to detect the amplitude of induced signal in the head, final
amplifier stages for zero field compensation and gain control.
The schematic diagram of the sensor was show in Fig. 2. The
oscillator circuit generates the sine wave form with frequency
of 100 kHz. The voltage to current converter supplies ac cur-
rent with constant amplitude of 10 mA to the sensing element.

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2728 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 45, NO. 6, JUNE 2009

Fig. 2. V versus H response of AGMI sensor system with the sensing element
2
of 10 mm 2 mm size.

Fig. 3. V versus H response of AGMI sensor system with the sensing element
2
of 10 mm 2 mm size.

where is the transfer function of AGMI magnetic sensor

system and become also field-sensitivity. We can find that the
Fig. 1. GMI ratio profile of Co Fe B Si ribbon with (a) 5 cm 2 mm 2 sensitivity A is 20 V/Oe from the slope as shown in Fig. 3.
2
size and (b) 5 mm 1 mm size. The inserted figures show the profiles for full Although our AGMI sensor system shows good response
0
measured range between 40 Oe and 40 Oe. characteristics as linear magnetic sensor, there are some limita-
tions in application due to hysteresis and temperature stability
because the magnetoimpedance has generally hysteresis and
The signal induced in the sensing element due to MI effect is temperature dependence.
picked up by differential amplifier and amplified by successive
amplifiers. The amplified induced signal is provided to the mul-
tiplier circuit. The multiplier circuit acts as a lock-in amplifier C. Negative Feedback
and it produces signal with frequency along with the dc offset
The concept of negative feedback in the MI sensor was first
voltage. The dc offset voltage is proportional to the amplitude
introduced by K. Mohri [3]. In order to improve the linearity
of in-phase component of the induced MI signal, then is propor-
and reduce hysteresis and temperature dependence of the AGMI
tional to the real part of magnetoimpedance of sensing element.
sensor system, we added negative feedback circuit. The final
The output signal from multiplier is passed through the low-pass
output voltage is converted into magnetic field and nega-
filter to obtain a pure dc voltage. Then, the dc signal is passed
tively feedback to the sensing element by a solenoid (coil) that
to amplifiers with offset and gain controls to get the final output
is wound over it and connected in series with the through a
voltage . The offset control is to adjust to zero at .
resistance . Fig. 4 shows the block diagram for the AGMI
Fig. 3 shows a response curve for magnetic field of the AGMI
sensor system with negative feedback loop, where is the in-
sensor system. The response curve shows almost linear response
verse transfer function from to magnetic field of the solenoid
well compensated at zero field in the range of—0.5 .5 Oe
and can be expressed as
which can be expressed by the following relation:

(2)
(1)

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YOON et al.: MAGNETIC SENSOR SYSTEM USING ASYMMETRIC GIANT MAGNETOIMPEDANCE HEAD 2729

response with sensitivity of 0.27 V/Oe, dynamic range of

and reduced hysteresis. The sensitivity of 0.27 V/Oe shows
good agreement with by (4) because with
from Fig. 4 and from (2).

III. CONCLUSION
Fig. 4. Block diagram for transfer function of AGMI sensor system with neg-
ative feedback. We have constructed a linear magnetic field sensor using
AGMI effect in field-annealed amorphous ribbons with sensi-
tivity of 0.27 V/Oe in dynamic range of without
hysteresis and temperature dependence. The AGMI sensor
system can be applied on Gauss meter and directional sensor
detecting the parallel component of Earth’s field.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support
from the BK 21, KRF, and ETRI under Project 2006-S-074-02
to carry out the investigations.

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