Full Wheatstone Bridge Spin-Valve Based Sensors for IC Currents Monitoring

Full Wheatstone bridge spin-valve-based electrical current sensors at the IC level are presented. Prototypes with different geometrical parameters have been designed, fabricated and fully characterized. DC characterization has been carried out, for measurement of insertion losses, linearity, voltage offset and sensitivity. Current ranges from 10 mu A to 100 mA can be covered with these sensors with excellent linearity and sensitivities above 1 mV/(V . mA). AC characteristics have also been analyzed and bandwidths exceeding 100 kHz are demonstrated. Moreover, the temperature coefficients have been extracted in the range of -20 degrees C to +60 degrees C. In order to highlight the design properties,dependence of the sensor's performance with external magnetic perturbations and self-heating have also been measured and quantified. The associated errors are in the range of 1%-2% of the full scale.