Investigation of an advanced micro-inductive sensor

This paper presents the characterization of a miniaturized displacement sensor based on the Inductosyn^® principle. In comparison to commercially available large-scaled inductive sensors the proposed linear transducer is fabricated in thin-film technology enabling a signal period of 44 μm. In order to analyze the sensor characteristics a test setup was prototyped and a phase measurement system based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) units was developed. The measurement results prove that displacements down to 1.7 nm can be resolved and a position repeatability of about 100 nm is achievable using the proposed inductive micro sensing system.