Magnetic Field Sensors: A Comparison of Two Technologies

The Hall effect was named after its discoverer, American physicist and thermoelectric researcher Harvard Edwin Herbert Hall. The Hall sensor acts as a magnetic field perpendicular to a current-carrying conductor, creating an electrical voltage across the current flow direction. There are many possible applications of this physical principle allowing the strength of an external magnetic field to be determined and measured. Current measurements are possible as each conductor through which current flows creates its own a magnetic field, which can be used to indirectly measure the current. Since the Hall effect is most pronounced in semiconductors, typically a small plate of semiconductor material is used as the Hall element.