Coreless Hall-effect current sensor IC offers superior SNR

Mouser now stocks the Allegro MicroSystems ACS37610 current sensor IC. Touted as the industry's first family of Hall-effect-sensing solutions aimed at automotive and industrial systems, the IC offers a genuinely coreless solution created to measure currents from 100A to greater than 4,000A flowing through a busbar or PCB trace without the necessity for an external concentrator or U-shaped magnetic shield.

This current sensor IC is AEC-Q100 Grade 0 automotive qualified and is ideal for EV high-voltage traction motor inverters, 48V/12V auxiliary inverters, overcurrent detection, DC-DC converters, heterogeneous redundant battery monitoring, smart fuses, PDUs and power supplies. It allows engineers to accurately measure hundreds or thousands of amps in a very economical and straightforward way and provides excellent immunity, greater precision, higher power density and enhanced efficiency while lowering system complexity, non-linearity errors, BOM cost, footprint and weight.

The device delivers a high accuracy of 1% (typ.), a fast response time of <2μs (typ.) and supplies factory-programmed segmented linear TC to provide low thermal drift. The IC features innovative differential Hall-based sensing technology, resulting in a 2.5x improvement in SNR with 2x lower noise compared to previous generations. The lower noise brings superior resolution for accurate torque control, while the sensor's 4x higher sensitivity range provides for more flexible busbar and PCB designs. To further improve the system's SNR, the IC also features larger Hall element spacing to accommodate notching to the current-carrying busbar or PCB copper trace. While not mandatory, this notching results in virtually no hotspots or thermal performance degradation.

High isolation and reliability are achieved through the no-contact nature of the simplified assembly and the IC's DC to 250kHz high-operating sensor bandwidth, resulting in contactless, lossless and non-invasive current sensing. Combine that with a dedicated user-programmable overcurrent (OCF) and overtemperature (OTF) fault pin and a slew of built-in diagnostics, and the device is ideal for safety-critical applications. Further accuracy and flexibility of the device are improved by user programmability, performed via the output pin or the dedicated programming pin. It comes in an ultra-compact, surface mountable, low-profile 8-pin TSSOP8 package. The device is offered in 150kHz and 250kHz bandwidth options, as well as regular and low-power modes, and has an ambient temperature range of -40C to 150C. The device is supported by the ASEK37610 evaluation boards, also available from Mouser.