Compact modeling of vertical hall-effect devices: Electrical behavior

The topic of this work is the building of a design-oriented compact model of vertical Hall-effect sensors integrated in CMOS technologies. The use of such a model should facilitate the work of integrated sensors designers, permitting them to simulate the sensor, the biasing and processing electronics together with the same electrical simulator. In this paper, focus is made on the electrical behavior, i.e. the resistive behavior of a 5-contact sensor. The model is based both on theoretical considerations and on numerical simulations performed with COMSOL^®. The result is a new compact model, written in Verilog-A, with 7 input terminals and 16 parameters, mainly the sensor geometry and the technology characteristics. These parameters can be easily extracted from measurements carried out on a single sensor. Our approach is validated by FEM simulations: the results obtained with the compact model exhibit an average error lower than 1% in comparison with simulations.