Allegro introduces the industry's first standalone coreless current sensor

     Allegro MicroSystems has announced the introduction of the world's first freestanding, Hall coreless current sensor, the ACS37612, which measures PCB or busbar currents above 200A to 1000A with 1% accuracy, without the need for a collector core or shield. Allegro's differential Hall components for measuring magnetic fields offer strong resistance to stray field interference, but do not require the laminated shielding required for competing solutions, reducing design size and bill of materials.

     Georges El Bacha, product Line Manager at Allegro, said: "We designed the ACS37612 to respond directly to trends in the electric vehicle market, and this is the industry's first truly coreless solution that can accurately measure hundreds of amps of current in a small size, solving a huge challenge for automotive engineers."

     When the electric vehicle accelerates, the current flowing through the traction motor inverter reaches hundreds of amps. Accurate measurement of such large currents is crucial to the safety performance of electric vehicles. Engineers typically rely on low-hysteresis, laminated magnetic cores to make such measurements, using three to six cores depending on the number of phases in the motor.

     The ACS37612 eliminates the magnetic core, so electric vehicle manufacturers can reduce the size and weight of the inverter, thereby improving the energy efficiency of electric vehicles. The non-invasive, non-contact current sensor is designed to improve the thermal efficiency of shunting solutions, making it ideal for reducing energy consumption in 48V electric platform systems. El Bacha added: "The advantage of the ACS37612 is its ability to increase efficiency while reducing the overall cost of the system, which is a win-win solution for both the car manufacturer and the consumer."

     ACS37612 can be used for both bus bar design and PCB wiring current design. It provides engineers with mechanical flexibility and simplifies their system-level solutions. The sensitivity of the ACS37612, the shape of the bus, and the position of the bus together determine the coupling coefficient of the system, so that the current detection range can be easily increased at any stage of the design. And the ultra-small package TSSOP8 (LU-8), its PCB package size is only 3mm x 6.4mm. Combined with the coreless design features, it can provide a very small and lightweight electrical fluometry solution.