AbstractThe sensitivity of conventional Hall Effect sensors is

strongly limited by the well-known short-circuit effect. Many

researches were directed to reduce offset and noise, but few works
were carried out to improve the sensitivity of these sensors. Here, a
new shape of integrated horizontal Hall Effect device is presented.
This particular shape has been developed to minimize the short-
circuit effects via reduction of length to width ratio of the sensor.
This results in reduction of sensors average resistance. A resolution
(minimum detectable magnetic field) of 590 p T has been reached
with a 100
nm
35
nm
10
nm
sensor biased with a current of 500 A.

KeywordsHall Effect, High sensitivity, Multiple Strips, Short-
circuit Effect.

I. INTRODUCTION
HE sensitivity of conventional hall effect devices is
strongly limited by the well known short-circuit effects
[1]. As well, in order to improve the signal to noise ratio of
magnetic field measurement systems, many researches were
performed to reduce the offset and the low frequency noise
level.
In this paper, the effective methods are investigated to
increase the sensitivity of devices and meanwhile, present
some new shapes of horizontal Hall Effect devices. In order to
show the merit of the presented devices, the sensitivity of
conventional rectangular device will be compared with 3, 4, 5
strips hall plates.
These new shapes allows to minimize the short-circuit
effects due to the biasing contacts and consequently allows to
increase the sensitivity of the devices.
II. HALL EFFECT DEVICES
A. Hall Effect
Fig. 1 presents a conventional rectangular Hall Effect
device. In a thin and infinitely long device with lateral sensing
contacts, the Hall voltage V
H
appearing between these sensing
contacts (S
1
and S
2
on Fig. 1) is proportional to the biasing
current (I) and the magnetic field component perpendicular to
the plate (B
Z
):



This work was supported in part by the Department of Electrical
Engineering, University of Tehran.
Reza Hosseini is with the Islamic Azad University, Science & Research
Branch,Tehran, Iran (e-mail:hosseini.elec@ gmail.com).
Alireza Kashaninia is with the Islamic Azad University, central Tehran
Branch, Tehran, Iran (e-mail: kashaninia@ iauctb.ac.ir).


| . | | |
z
H
H
B I
t
R
V =
(1)
c
n
H
qn
r
R =
(2)

where R
H
denotes the Hall coefficient, t is the thickness of the
plate, q is the magnitude of the electron charge, n
c
shows the
carrier density, and r
n
stands for the scattering factor of
material.


Fig. 1 Conventional Hall Effect Device

B. Rectangular Hall Device
In practical rectangular Hall effect devices (Fig. 1), the
biasing (B1 and B2) and the sensing contacts are responsible
for the short-circuit effects which reduce the Hall voltage by a
geometry dependent correction factor. Under low magnetic
induction, the geometrical correction factor of a long
rectangular Hall plate (L/W >1.5 ) with small sensing contacts
(S/W <0.18 ) can be approximated by the following formula
[3]:
]
2
1 )].[
2
exp( 1 [
W
S
W
L
G
rect

where L and W denote the length and the width of the device,
and S is the sensing contacts size (Fig. 1). The first term of
Eq.3 represents the Hall voltage reduction due to the large
current supplying contacts B1 and B2 while the last one
considers the current lines deflection near the sensing contacts
S1 and S2.
To keep G
rect
close to unity, L has to be greater than W.
Consequently, the resistance R
rect
between the biasing contacts
of conventional rectangular Hall devices is generally large [3]:

W
L
R R
rect
=
(4)
Introducing a High Sensitive Hall Effect Sensor
Reza Hosseini, and Alireza Kashaninia
T
(3)
World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology
Vol:2 2008-03-25
376 International Scholarly and Scientific Research & Innovation
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t n q
R
c

1
=

(5)

R is the square resistance of the device material and is the

mobility.
C. Increasing Sensitivity
The minimum detectable field of a Hall sensor can be
defined as [6]:
H H
noise
I R
V
B =
min
(6)
The main noise component is due to Johnson noise
2 / 1
) 4 ( f TR k V
s B noise
=
, where k
B
is the Boltzmann constant, R
s

is the series resistance, f is the measurement bandwidth, and
T is the absolute temperature.
The sensitivity of Hall Devices can be increased via
following ways:

I. Multiple Strips Hall Device
To overcome this sensitivity limitation, one can reduce the
input resistance while keeping the geometrical correction
factor close to one. To implement this idea, a new shape of
horizontal Hall Effect device has been developed. This
particular shape is based on a principle first proposed by
Popovic for magnetic field effect transistors (MagFETs). It
consists of supplying the current into a short Hall Effect active
zone with multiple distributed current sources (Fig. 2).
Since the output impedances of these sources are very high,
the device behaves as if it is infinitely long while it is kept
actually short.
It was proved that in n strips Hall Effect device the
resistance of device is n times smaller than conventional
rectangular device (
n
R
R
rect
rnew
=
) [3].

Fig. 2 Biasing principle using distributed current source

II. Mobility
Using the materials with high charge carrier mobility in
rectangular hall plate will increase the sensitivity. If the
mobility is increased, resistance will be decreased (Eq. 5),
which results in decreasing in V
noise
(Eq. 6) and hence,
sensitivity of the device will be improved. Initial Hall plate
used Si with the mobility of about 1000cm
2
/v.s.The materials
are recently used, like InAs and InSb, have mobility of 22000
and 40000cm
2
/v.s respectively.
III. Bias Current
Increasing bias current can improve sensitivity of device. It
can be shown from Eq. 6 that if Hall current increase,
minimum detectable field will be decreased.
III. NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS
A. Conventional Rectangular Hall Device
To verify the effect of charge carrier mobility in device
sensitivity, it has been compared the simulated behavior of a
rectangular plate with materials of different mobilities. These
simulations were carried out with ISE-TCAD. First, the plate
of 100
nm
35
nm
10
nm
with N
d
=610
16
and bias current 500
A was simulated with Si as its constituent material. The
resultant sensitivity was 39T (Fig. 3), For GaAs from the
other hand, it was achieved as 11T (Fig. 4) and for InAs as
650nT (Fig. 5) (The estimated sensitivities are corresponded
to the lowest break points in the relative characteristic curves).
Electron mobility in InAs is greater than GaAs and in GaAs is
greater than Si. So, it can be seen that high mobility materials
increase Hall plate sensitivity.


Fig. 3 Relative sensitivity of Si plate


Fig. 4 Relative sensitivity of GaAs plate
B. Multiple Strips
In order to verify the effect of multi strips and distributed
current source in increasing the device sensitivity, the four and
five strips 100
nm
35
nm
10
nm
hall devices were simulated. In
4 strips hall plate, it was used four InAs strips with 3 GaAs
strips between them. These GaAs strips reduce short circuit
World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology
Vol:2 2008-03-25
377 International Scholarly and Scientific Research & Innovation
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effects. In this device, minimum detectable magnetic field
reaches down to 1.3nT which is smaller than that of
conventional hall plates (Fig. 6).
For 5 strips Hall sensor (Fig. 7) sensitivity is strongly
increased. This hall sensor can detect the magnetic field of
590 pT (Fig. 8).this model used 5 InAs strips with N
d
=610
16

and 4 GaAs strips with N
d
=810
17
.


Fig. 5 Relative sensitivity of InAs plate


Fig. 6 Relative sensitivity of 4 strips hall effect sensor



Fig. 7 Five strips hall plate (black strips are InAs, bright ones are
GaAs and reds are bias contacts)

Fig. 8 Relative sensitivity of 5 strips hall effect sensor
IV. CONCLUSION
A new shape of integrated horizontal Hall Effect devices
has been proposed. The resulting multiple strips device
exhibits a lower input resistance than conventional horizontal
Hall Effect devices, while keeping a geometrical correction
factor near to unity. Since the input resistance directly limits
the intensity of the biasing current, this low resistive device
presents a higher maximum sensitivity than conventional
rectangular devices. Thus, by increasing the number of strips
as much as needed, it is possible to enhance the sensitivity as
much as desired. This helps to improve the resolution of the
sensory system. With a biasing current of 500A, the sensor
based on a 100
nm
35
nm
10
nm
five strips Hall Effect device
exhibits a sensitivity of 590 p T.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Dr. Morteza Fathipoor and
his students in CAD design center at the department of
Electrical Engineering, University of Tehran, for their
constructive collaborations.
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Hall Effect Sensor With High Maximum Absolute Sensitivity IEEE
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World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology
Vol:2 2008-03-25
378 International Scholarly and Scientific Research & Innovation
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Reza Hosseini was born in 1982. He received the M.S.
degree in semiconductor devices from the Islamic Azad
University, Central Tehran branch, Iran, in 2007. He is
currently Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering at the
Islamic Azad University, Science & Research branch,
Tehran, Iran





Alireza Kashaninia was born in 1972. He received the BEng in Electronics
Communication from University of Tehran, Iran, MEng in semiconductor
devices from the IAUSTB, Iran and PhD in Electronics Biomedical
Engineering from Islamic Azad University, Science & Research Branch,
Tehran, Iran in 1996, 2000 and 2005 respectively. He is now professor
assistant in Electrical Engineering in IAUCTB, Tehran, Iran. His current field
of interests contains semiconductor and nano_scale electronic devices, RF
characterization and advanced biomedical devices.

World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology
Vol:2 2008-03-25
379 International Scholarly and Scientific Research & Innovation
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