Hello, and welcome to the Introduction to the LDC Calculator Tool TI Precision Labs video. My name is Justin Beigel. And today, we will be covering the contents and a brief overview of the LDC calculator tool we have available on ti.com. Before talking about what the tool does, it is good to know why we need the tool. The basics of LC sensors have been covered in another video, so we won't be covering those details here.

When designing a sensor coil, there are many important parameters to take into consideration. Most designs start with the size available for the sensor coil or the device that is going to be used. From there, parameters like the trace width, layers, capacitance, and inner diameter all play a part in the sensor design. The calculated parameters like Q factor and frequency need to be considered for the device that is chosen and are impacted by many different parameters.

With all this taken into consideration, designing an LC sensor becomes much easier with the tool. The LDC calculator tool is a ZIP file with two to Excel spreadsheets that can be utilized to perform many of the calculations involved in designing for an LDC application. This tool is available online and can be found on most of the LDC device product pages or under Technical Resources on the inductive sensing home page. The download link provides a ZIP file that contains a readme text file, the LDC_Tools spreadsheet, and the Excel_FEMM spreadsheet.

We're going to start by talking about the LDC_Tools spreadsheet first. Shown here is the Contents tab of the spreadsheet. It has an embedded instructions PDF that can be opened for more information and a link to our E2E forum, where you can ask any question you have or search for answers among the many already answered. This tab includes links to all other tabs, but you can also navigate around by clicking on the desired tab at the bottom of the Excel spreadsheet.

Lastly, the Contents page has Quick Calculation section that does basic calculations if the inductance and capacitance are already known. The Spiral Inductor Designer tab is a great tool for designing an inductive coil. This tab has many specific inputs and is great for calculating the expected inductance of a coil based on its physical parameters. From there, the frequency and Q factor are also obtained, given the capacitance of the sensor. Again, there is an embedded instructions document with more information if needed.

The Skin Depth tab is a useful tool for determining the thickness needed by a metal target to achieve good coupling between the sensor and target. This tab has some explanation on it as well as the calculations involved. There are several device-specific tabs available on the spreadsheet as well. These can provide more specific calculations or even some recommended register settings depending on the device chosen. On the right is a snippet of the LDC3114 configuration tab. But each device will look different and have different information on it.

Lastly, in the LDC calculation spreadsheet are the application-specific tabs. These tabs are designed around specific use cases of the sensors and have some generic informations and calculations for these different cases. The Finite Element Method Magnets or FEMM spreadsheet is similar to the Spiral Inductor Designer tab but uses a FEMM simulation rather than a calculation through equations. This is a bit more accurate than the Spiral Inductor Designer but requires FEMM to be installed on the computer. The spreadsheet will prompt the user in the case that FEMM is not already installed on the computer. You can find more information by going to FEMM's home page.

And that concludes this introduction video. Thank you for watching. For more information on inductive technology, please visit the inductive sensing homepage.