Biaxial FBAR Magnetic Sensor Based on Fe80Ga20 Anisotropic ΔE Effect

With the increasing application of personal navigation system in consumer electronics, the demand for multi-axis magnetic sensors based on MEMS is growing. We report a biaxial MEMS DC magnetic sensor consisting of an Mo/AlN/Fe80Ga20 film bulk acoustic resonator (FBAR), with anisotropy ΔE effect-based sensing principle. Different from the previously reported one-dimensional magnetic sensor based on the ΔE effect, the anisotropic ΔE effect was used to realize in-plane and out-of-plane two-dimensional magnetic field responses on a discrete sensor, and the sensor had two readout methods: resonant frequency f and return loss S11. The magnetic sensor realized the resonant frequency f shifted by 1.03 MHz and 0.2 MHz in the 567 Oe in-plane magnetic field and 720 Oe out-of-plane magnetic field, respectively, and the S11 changes by -30.2 dB and -0.92 dB. As the applied magnetic field increases, the -3 dB bandwidth quality factor Q3dB of the S11 curve gradually increases, and its maximum values in the in-plane and out-of-plane magnetic fields are 77143 and 1828, respectively, which reduces the detection limit of the magnetic sensor. The resonant magnetic sensor has stable high linear temperature and frequency drift characteristics, and its temperature frequency coefficient is -48.7 ppm/℃.

Size Dependence of the Magnetoelastic Properties of Metallic Glasses for Actuation Applications

We present an exhaustive study of the magnetoelastic properties of 24 strips with different rectangular dimensions, cut from a long ribbon of Metglas® 2826MB3. The strips have a length-to-width ratio R = L/w ranging from 2 to over 20. Significant variations of the apparent saturation Young’s modulus and the ΔE effect with strip geometry, changing from 160 GPa and 4% for L = 10 mm, w = 5 mm and R = 2, to 164 GPa and 9.6% for L = 35 mm, w = 1.7 mm and R = 20.6, have been observed. In order to obtain the highest values of the ΔE effect, the magnetomechanical coupling coefficient, k, and the quality factor of the resonance, Q, a value R > 14 is needed. The effective anisotropy field Hk*, taken as the minimum of the E(H) curve, and its width ΔH, are not as strongly influenced by the R value, and a value of R > 7 is enough to reach the lowest value. From our measurements we infer that the formerly predicted value of R > 5 needed for a good magnetic and magnetoelastic response of the material must be actually regarded as the lowest limit for this parameter. In fact, we show that the demagnetizing factor N, rather than the length-to-width ratio R, is the parameter that governs the magnetoelastic performance of these strips.