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Measuring inducatcne of a small printed antenna on a PCB?

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treez

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Hi,
The attached is a printed antenna on a 4 layer PCB. (The grid lines are 1mm lines) It uses all four layers of the PCB to increase the turns. It is connected to an ST25DV04K-IER6S3 IC which reads signal received by this antenna.
Due to tolerances in the PCB manufacture, the thickness of the 0.15mm turns will have a tolerance, and so we need to measure the inductance of the sample one that we have. We believe the best way for us to do this is to solder a known C0G capacitor to its terminals and switch a DC voltage on to it, and then read the ringing frequency on a scope….then calculate inductance via w^2 = 1/(LC).
{obviously doing this with an unpopulated PCB…….just the resonant (test) capacitor soldered on.}
Do you believe that this is the best way?
We suspect that a large range of inductance values would actually still allow it to work, but thought we better check because the PCB manufacturer came back to us and offered to measure its inductance…because they said there would be a manuafacturing tolerance in the induictance.

ST25DV04K-IER6S3
https://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/st25dv04k.pdf
 

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This is actually quite a good way to measure small inductances. I estimate your pcb coil is probably in the range of 100nH - 300nH depending on the exact dimensions. I have only recently used the exact same method of measurement ... and it works !!

Some of the things you have to plan for as follows :

1) The pulse/ square wave you use to drive this should have a very fast rise time for best results. I found that a fast schottky buffer works fine. Being able to vary the pulse width and repetition rate helps a lot. For this I used an AVR uC
2) The capacitor in parallel should be selected to ensure your ringing freq is within your measurement scope' capabilities. I used 680pF, but other values in that region will work too.
3) You should couple your "pulse generator" to this LC through a small capacitor. Between 10pF to 47pF should be OK. Smaller cap --> lower energy, but less impact on resonant freq; and vice versa for a larger cap.
4) Keep all leads as small as possible !! Any closed loop which falls within the LC combination will corrupt the results ! If you MUST have 2 conductors, then run them parallel and close together to minimise their L.
5) Don't forget to factor in the capacitance of your scope probe - which would typically be parallel to the C0G cap and add to it.

all the best
 
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