Current Sensing Techniques: A Review

This paper provides a thorough review of state-of-the-art current sensing techniques. It catalogues the current sensors according to the underlying physical principle in order to point out their strengths and weaknesses.

I. Introduction

Information regarding current flow is required in a wide range of electrical and electronics applications. Each application has different performance requirements in terms of cost, isolation, precision, bandwidth, measurement range, or size and many different current measurement methods have been developed to satisfy these demands. Today, current information increasingly needs to be available in digital form for digital control or monitoring purposes. This requires the output signal of a particular current sensing technique to be acquired by an analog-to-digital converter.