Circular vertical hall (CVH) sensing element with signal processing and arctangent function

A magnetic field sensor, comprising:

• a circular vertical Hall (CVH) sensing element to produce an analog signal representing an external magnetic field;
• an analog-to-digital converter coupled to receive the analog signal and produce a digital signal;
• a quadrature modulator circuit coupled to the digital signal and operable to generate a plurality of quadrature modulated signals comprising a first modulated signal and a second modulated signal, wherein the quadrature modulator circuit comprises:
• a first modulator to modulate the digital signal by applying a cosine signal to the digital signal to generate the first modulated signal, wherein the cosine signal is associated with a frequency associated with a duty cycle of the CVH sensing element;
• a second modulator to modulate the signal by applying a sine signal to the digital signal to generate the second modulated signal, wherein the sine signal is associated with the frequency associated with the duty cycle of the CVH sensing element;
• and
• a processor stage coupled to use signals representative of the plurality of quadrature modulated signals and operable to perform an arctangent calculation to determine an estimated angle of the external magnetic field,
• wherein the processor stage comprises a circuit to perform a Coordinate Rotation Digital Computer (CORDIC) algorithm to perform the arctangent calculation on the first modulated signal and the second modulated signal to determine the estimated angle of the external magnetic field.