Analysis of the efficiency of spinning-current techniques thru compact modeling

Hall-sensors integrated in CMOS technology are good candidates for the design of low-cost magnetometers. However, one of their major limitations is the 0-field offset, and it is essential to take this effect into account in the very early steps of the design process. For this purpose, we recently developed a new compact model for horizontal cross-shaped Hall-effect device. It is based on physical considerations and takes all the device offset sources into account. For applications where the offset issue is critical, the well known spinning-current technique (SC) can be used to reduce the offset. In this paper, we first analyze the efficiency of four different implementations (number of phases, type of bias) of the SC technique on the different offset sources. Second, we compare these SC techniques by Monte-Carlo analysis. Simulations lead to several interesting conclusions, such as the fact that the best offset cancellation is achieved with the 4-phases SC and a current bias.