Infineon Incorporates Nobel Prize-Winning Technology into its Sensors
This year’s Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to the discoverers of the giant magneto resistance effect. Infineon has begun using this effect to measure steering angle in automobiles and has begun volume manufacturing of an integrated giant magneto resistance sensor (iGMR).
The GMR effect is based on a change in resistance produced by a magnetic field in a multilayered metal film several nanometers thick. Put simply, the film consists of a reference layer with a fixed, stable direction of magnetization (the reference direction) and a sensor layer whose magnetization follows an externally applied magnetic field, like a the needle of a compass. The sensor layer and reference layer are separated by a layer of copper just a few atoms thick, which produces the GMR effect.
The Infineon sensor chip, the TLE 5010, provides two digital angle components – a sine function and a cosine function. An 8-bit microcontroller connected to the sensor over an SPI interface uses these to compute an exact angle signal.
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