CMOS quad spinning-current Hall sensor system for compass application

A Hall sensor system for a compass application is presented. The Hall sensor, its instrumentation amplifier and ADC are realized in standard CMOS, while the timing and control signals are generated by an external microprocessor. The Hall sensor consists of four eight-direction spinning-current Hall-plates in a quad configuration, which decreases the cross-sensitivity for stress by a factor of 1200, and decreases the cross-sensitivity for temperature by a factor of 5. The system has a typical offset of 2 /spl mu/T (20 mGauss), which is a factor 25 lower than the single spinning-current Hall-plate by Munter and a factor 5 lower than the continuous-spinning Hall-plate by Steiner. No trimming or calibration has been used to reduce the offset.