High sensitivity vertical Hall sensor integrated with SOI CMOS

We present the design and performance of the gated vertical Hall sensor integrated with silicon on insulator (SOI) complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuits. We demonstrated almost a factor of ten improvement in sensitivity over the comparable vertical Hall sensor integrated on bulk CMOS i.e. constant voltage and constant current sensitivity of 1200 V/V*T versus 130 V/V*T and 200mV/A*T versus 23 mV/A*T respectively. The high sensitivity is probably related to the inherent amplification mechanism in the gated structure. We offer our interpretation of the physical principles of the built in gain and its dependence on bias conditions.