Limitations of Magnetoresistive Current Sensors in Industrial Electronics Applications

Electrical current monitoring is a key issue in the most of the industrial electronics systems. For this reason, a huge effort has been, and is being, carried out in finding optimal current meters, for different scenarios. With the recent development of the giant magnetoresistance principle, the interest on magnetoresistance based electrical current sensors has been relaunched. These sensors display obvious advantages with respect to classical current metering methods, and also when compared to Hall effect based ones. Nevertheless, some issues still need to be fixed, before they can definitively replace the classical schemes. In this paper, a sound and up to date review is made regarding the particular limitations of magnetoresistive based current sensors, when used in industrial environments. These limitations are mainly related to the range of application, voltage offset, surrounding noise sources, temperature drift, bandwidth and lack of electrical models. Copyright (C) 2011 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved