High Accuracy Open-Type Current Sensor with a Differential Planar Hall Resistive Sensor

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a high accuracy open-type current sensor with a differential Planar Hall Resistive (PHR) sensor. Conventional open-type current sensors with magnetic sensors are usually vulnerable to interference from an external magnetic field. To reduce the effect of an unintended magnetic field, the proposed design uses a differential structure with PHR. The differential structure provides robust performance to unwanted magnetic flux and increased magnetic sensitivity. In addition, instead of conventional Hall sensors with a magnetic concentrator, a newly developed PHR with high sensitivity is employed to sense horizontal magnetic fields. The PHR sensor and read-out integrated circuit (IC) are integrated through a post-Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process using multichip packaging. The current sensor is designed to measure a 1 A current level. The measured performance of the designed current sensor has a 16 kHz bandwidth and a current nonlinearity of under +/- 0.5%.