A7.4 - Offset Tracing in Hall Sensors by Integrated Temperature Coefficient Determination

Event
SENSOR+TEST Conferences 2009
2009-05-26 - 2009-05-28
Congress Center Nürnberg
Band
Proceedings SENSOR 2009, Volume II
Chapter
A7 - Magnetic Sensors II
Author(s)
M. Stahl-Offergeld, D. Cichon, H. Hohe - Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, Erlangen, Germany, A. Schuetze - Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany
Pages
59 - 64
DOI
10.5162/sensor09/v2/a7.4
ISBN
978-3-9810993-5-5
Price
free

Abstract

Hall sensors in CMOS technologies are ever present. Modern sensors are able to measure all three orthogonal components of the magnetic flux density at approximately one point. Unfortunately Hall sensors have comparative high offsets, but there are a number of known techniques to reduce the offset. The best known are the spinning current technique and orthogonal coupling. Using these methods reduces the offset by several magnitudes, but a residual offset always remains. Additionally, this residual offset has a non-linear temperature dependency. The compensation of the residual offset can improve the sensors’ performance. Up to now it has been necessary to measure the offset at different temperatures during the volume test. This takes a lot of time and, hence, costs money. With this proposed integrated temperature coefficient determination and a special algorithm, it is possible to trace the offset across the whole temperature range with only one required start-up point which can be measured easily and cheaply during the volume test.

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