Experimental comparison of ring and diamond shaped planar Hall effect bridge magnetic field sensors

Abstract

Planar Hall effect magnetic field sensors with ring and diamond shaped geometries are experimentally compared with respect to their magnetic field sensitivity and total signal variation. Theoretically, diamond shaped sensors are predicted to be 41% more sensitive than corresponding ring shaped sensors for negligible shape anisotropy. To experimentally validate this, we have fabricated both sensor geometries in the exchange-biased stack Ni80Fe20(tFM)/Cu(tCu)/Mn80Ir20(10 nm) with tFM=10, 20, and 30 nm and tCu=0, 0.3, and 0.6 nm. Sensors from each stack were characterized by external magnetic field sweeps, which were analyzed in terms of a single domain model. The total signal variation of the diamond sensors was generally found to be about 40% higher than that for the ring sensors in agreement with theoretical predictions. However, for the low-field sensitivity, the corresponding improvement varied from 0% to 35% where the largest improvement was observed for sensor stacks with comparatively strong exchange bias. This is explained by the ring sensors being less affected by shape anisotropy than the diamond sensors. To study the effect of shape anisotropy, we also characterized sensors that were surrounded by the magnetic stack with a small gap of 3 μm. These sensors were found to be less affected by shape anisotropy and thus showed higher low-field sensitivities.