This full text paper was peer-reviewed at the direction of IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society prior to the
acceptance and publication.
A novel approach of using a planar inductive position sensor for the Permanent
magnet synchronous motor control application
Bala sundaram Nauduri
MSRF group
Microsemi India Pvt. Ltd.
Hyderabad, India
bala.sundaram@microsemi.com
Abstract— Permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSM)
are taking over the commercial, industrial (robotics) and
automotive industry. Most of the applications demand high
starting torque at zero speed. For generating the desired
amount of torque at zero speed, accurate rotor position
information is necessary, which is obtained by using position
sensors. Hall sensors with digital output are sensitive to
temperature and external magnetic fields and do not offer high
resolution. Optical encoders provide good resolution but lead
to higher cost and reliability related issues in the
harsh/contaminated environment. Inductive sensing
technology is an emerging technology which can be used in
wide range of application such as proximity, angular
displacement, linear displacement etc. PMSM control is one
such application that can make use of planar Inductive
position sensors which are contactless sensors, works on
LVDT principle. These can be inexpensively built with
stationary printed circuit board PCB coils and metal target.
Inductive sensors are absolute devices which mean that they
need no motion at power up to determine position. This paper
covers planar inductive position sensor and its usage in PMSM
control application. The experiments are carried out to
substantiate the proposed technique in the speed controlled
drive system of PMSM.
Keywords — PMSM; Planar inductive position sensor;
LVDT; PCB, metal target; motor control; fixed-point
microcontroller.
I. INTRODUCTION
The conventional DC motor commutates with the
mechanical commutator, whereas the PMSM [1] needs
electronic commutation to align stator fields with respect to
rotor magnetic field. There are various commutation
techniques like trapezoidal and sinusoidal commutation.
In the Sinusoidal Commutation technique [2], all the 3 coils
conduct at any given point in time. The currents through the
coils are Sinusoidal with a phase displaced by120°. The torque
produced is smooth compared to other techniques.
978-1-5386-2092-2/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
Ganesh Shaga
MSRF group
Microsemi India Pvt. Ltd.
Hyderabad, India
ganesh.shaga@microsemi.com
In PMSM, the stator and rotor fields are not orthogonal to
each other by built. Field Oriented Control [3] is one of the
techniques used to achieve sinusoidal commutation, it
decouples the control of torque and flux by transforming the
stator current (phase currents) from a stationary reference
frame to a rotating reference frame.
Rotor position is crucial for proper Sinusoidal
commutation and good starting torque. Better resolution of
position information leads to synchronized voltage waveforms
and better performance. To get BLDC rotor position
information, one of the commonly used techniques is discrete
hall sensors which provide discrete position information at
every 60° interval. In discrete position sensing, the position is
updated based on the resolution of the sensor. For example;
using three Hall-effect sensors [4] gives a resolution of 60°,
resulting in quasi-sinusoidal phase currents which intern
reduce the efficiency, induce torque ripple and mechanical
noise/vibration. By increasing the resolution, better
commutation and sinusoidal phase currents can be achieved.
The other technique is Resolvers [5], provides continues
position information in sine and cosine waveforms using a
separate motor winding structure but adds additional cost to
the system. The third technique is using high-resolution
absolute encoders [6], provides high resolution but susceptible
to the contaminated environment as it is optically based and
increases cost with resolution.
This paper explains the use of planar inductive position
sensor for rotor position sensing of PMSM and control. Planar
inductive sensors are laid on PCB, lowering the cost of the
system compared to resolver sensors. Planar windings have
been designed on PCB in earlier work [7]-[11]. This
application that shows 0.8% position accuracy and immunity
to air gap uses the sensor design implemented in two-layered
PCB [12].With symmetrical coil structures the accuracy of
planar inductive sensor will go up to 0.1%.The planar
inductive position sensor module consists of sensor structure
PCB, copper target along with the Microsemi LX3302
inductive sensor interface device [13]. Sensor module gives
the position information in sine and cosine waveforms. These
data are used to determine the rotor position.
 II. PMSM CONTROL OVERVIEW ground, and system interface pins, eliminating the need for
external protection components.

Fig.1. Block diagram of PMSM control Fig. 2. Block diagram of LX3302.

As shown in the block diagram Fig. 1, rotor position plays

a crucial role in transforming the motor currents from rotating
frame (α and β) to stationary frame (Id and Iq) and vice-versa.
Typical sensor-less algorithms use back EMF of the motor to
estimate the speed and rotor position. As back EMF is
proportional to motor RPM, it is practically difficult to
estimate the rotor position at low or zero speed. The absolute
position sensor provides rotor position information at zero
speed improving the starting speed. It simplifies the speed and
position estimation.
Typical Back EMF estimator:
(1)
In the eq 1, the Back EMF error voltage of the motor is
proportional to the motor speed and at zero speed it is almost
close to zero. Moreover to perform rotating frame to stationary
frame transform Park Transform position information (Ɵ) is
needed as shown in equation 2
Sensor design consists of two cross-coupled LC resonant
oscillators, two sense coils and 3/4th metal target with 1mm air
gap. The oscillatory and sense coils are routed on PCB layers
and the capacitor value chosen based on the desired resonance
frequency. Exciter coils are excited by the oscillator pins of
the device. Sense coil feedback signals from the inductive
sensor are conditioned, demodulated, and converted into 13-
bit values. The MCU processes these values to produce a
linearized measurement value with either 12-bit accuracy
(analog, PSI5, or SENT output) or 13-bit accuracy (PWM
output.). In this application, Sine and Cosine values are used
to process the rotor position.
Fig. 3. Sensor board layout Fig. 4. Target PCB layout

(2)
And the same Ɵ is used to transform from stationary frame to
rotating frame in equation 3
Fig. 5. Sensor board Fig. 6. Target PCB

(3)

A. LX3302 Sensor Board

The Microsemi LX3302 inductive sensor interface device
is used to process inductive sensors, which are based upon
linear variable differential transformer (LVDT) principles.
LX3302 integrates two complete analog channels,
oscillator/exciter, 32-bit RISC processor, non-volatile
configuration memory and four programmable I/O which
support a variety of interface options. In addition, the LX3302
provides internal 8kV (HBM) ESD protection on the power,
 III. IMPLEMENTATION
The motor control algorithm is implemented on a low
profile 16-bit PIC microcontroller with 12 Kbytes program
space and 512 bytes’ data RAM. The algorithm takes care of
the sensor signal conditioning such as DC offset error
compensation and relative amplitude mismatch compensation,
extracting position information from sensor signals, current
control, speed control, commutation, auto calibration to align
sensor Ɵ with the rotor mechanical Ɵ and communication with
a Graphical user interface(GUI). Detailed implementation is
described in the following section. A typical block diagram of
the motor control setup consisting of an Inductive sensor
assembly mounted on the PMSM motor, motor control driver
card and GUI to control the motor is as shown in Fig. 7, 8.
Fig. 7. Motor control block diagram.
Fig. 8. Actual system setup depicting GUI, motor with sensor, driver PCB.
A. DC Offset compensation
Sensor sine and cosine signals with dc offset are not
desirable. DC offset degrades the estimated position. The DC
offset on the sensor signals can be calculated by looking at the
signal peaks. The absolute sum of the positive and negative
peaks of each signal results in twice the offset. The offset can
be calculated independently from both signals as given in
equation 4 and subtract it from the respective sensor signal
while processing the signals for position information.
(4)
The calculated offset value is subtracted from the
respective raw sensor signal resulting in sensor DC offset
compensation, as given in equations 5 and 6.
(5)
(6)
B. Relative amplitude mismatch compensation
Correcting relative amplitude and forcing both the signals
to have same amplitude is important to get accurate position
information. The absolute difference between the positive and
negative peaks provides the relative weight that must be
multiplied to adjust the amplitude imbalance, as shown in the
equation 7
(7)
Relative amplitude compensation is achieved as shown below
(8)
C. Speed and position estimate
The absolute rotor position is calculated by taking inverse
tan of the ratio of the two sensor signals as given in equation 9
(9)
The angular speed is calculated from the derivative of the
with respect to time.
(10)
D. Auto Calibration The raw sensor signals are captured using GUI and depicted in
The calculated in the equation 9 must be in phase Fig. 9.
with the actual rotor angle to produce the defined amount of
torque for given current, one way to align the with Fig. 9. Raw sensor signals.
rotor position is, by mechanically adjusting the target plate till
both positions get aligned. The present method, initially run
the motor in closed loop at a defined operating point and
taking the sensor feedback parallel to calculate the phase shift
between the measured position from the sensor signals and
estimated position from the closed-loop control. The
calculated position offset is stored and added to the
while the system is running on the sensor feedback. The
calibration routine is executed only once to estimate the
position offset as the position offset do not change until the
mechanical alignment of the sensor assembly is not altered.

E. Close loop rotor position calculation

The closed-loop rotor position is estimated from the rotor
flux using the voltage model of the motor’s rotating field. To
determine the actual rotor position, the rotor flux vector can be
estimated by integrating the stator voltage as given in the
equation 11. However, during startup the position information
is not taken from the flux estimation, the motor starts in open The Fig. 10, shows the amplitude imbalance and DC offset
loop and once it reaches desired RPM the position estimation compensated waveforms
and position offset estimation loops are enabled.

Fig. 10. Compensated sensor signals.

(11)
The calculated rotor flux vectors α and β are sinusoids with
90° phase shift with respect to each other and can be used to
estimate the rotor position by taking the tan inverse.

(12)
The first derivative of the calculated in the
equation 12 with respect to time gives rotor angular speed.

(13) The auto-calibration state calculates the position offset to

align with . Fig. 11, shows the closed loop
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS (Blue) , the (Magenta) and with the position
Experiments are carried out to practically offset (yellow).
demonstrate the above theory, on a 4000 RPM, 20V, 4 pole-
pair PMSM motor, motor control algorithm is implemented on
the 16-bit microcontroller (dsPIC30F2010), GUI is used for
data collection and controlling the motor control board, below
is the summary of the results.

The raw sensor signals contain DC offset and relative

amplitude imbalance as discussed earlier, the motor control
algorithm dynamically compensates these errors and executed
along with the motor control loop to address the minor
distortion due to mechanical vibration and electrical noise.
 Fig. 11. Sensor theta and closed loop theta along with theta offset.
The calculated position offset is added to the sensor position
to align it with the closed loop position as shown in Fig. 12.
Fig. 12. Sensor theta aligned with closed loop theta.
Once the position offset is calculated, the motor control
algorithm can start the motor on sensor feedback in closed
loop and accelerate the motor to a defined speed (RPM), Fig.
13, depicts the motor startup on sensor feedback in a closed
loop under steady load. The speed requirement is increased
linearly (Magenta) and observed the motor speed (Green)
catches up the requirement.
Fig. 13. Running the motor in the closed loop.
V. CONCLUSION
This paper presents the planar inductive position sensor
and its usage in PMSM control application. The experiments
are carried out to validate the algorithm performance and
practically implemented in a fixed-point Microcontroller to
substantiate the proposed technique in the speed controlled
drive system of PMSM. Experimental results show that the
proposed design exhibits satisfactory performance.
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