Inside TI’s Multiaxial Approach to Coreless Current Sensing

What it means for hiring

Taking the magnetic core out of a current sensor removes cost, mass and saturation, and hands you back a sensor that hears every other busbar in the inverter. TI's answer in the TMCS2100-Q1 is to measure on more than one axis and reject the field it did not ask for. That is a sensible trade and it is also an admission of how crowded a modern traction inverter has become, with three phases, a DC link and a busbar layout that was optimised for thermal and mechanical reasons long before anyone asked where the sensor would go.

On most inverter programmes the current sensing decision belongs to one or two engineers, and they are the hardest people on the team to replace. The skill is not sensor selection; it is the person who can read a busbar geometry, predict the crosstalk, take it to the EMC chamber and be right. They come from traction inverter work, from industrial drives above a hundred kilowatts, and occasionally from metering. If a client tells you their inverter schedule slipped on EMC, this is the vacancy they should have opened nine months earlier.

Read the original at Power Electronics News .