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Skin friction plays a great role in the total drag of hypersonic vehicles, and skin friction balance is widely used to measure the skin friction of hypersonic vehicles directly. A great number of skin friction balances are developed to test the skin friction in impulse tunnels, which include strain gauge balance, piezoelectric balance, fiber optical balance, and MEMS based skin friction gauge. The design of skin friction balance based on piezoelectric ceramic is introduced in this paper. The cantilever beam structure is used in the design, the skin friction are test by the piezoelectric ceramics symmetrically stuck to the cantilever beam. The polarized orientation of the piezoelectric ceramic is used to minimize the skin friction output influenced by the flow pressure on the surface of the model. In the design, the finite element analysis by the software of ANSYS is used to evaluate the character of the skin friction balance. The analysis contains the static force analysis and mode analysis. A skin friction balance with the cantilever beam thickness of 4mm is developed according to the finite element analysis design results. The sensitivity is 0.957V/N compared with the simulation result of 1.16V/N. The first order response frequency is 2563Hz compared with the simulation result of 2746Hz. The sensitivity difference may be caused by the glue which used to stick the piezoelectric ceramic to the skin friction balance structure, and the response frequency difference may be caused by the simplified model in the ANSYS simulation. The result showed that, the sensitivity and frequency of the skin friction balance can satisfied the need of the shock tunnel skin friction measurement. The combination of the piezoelectric ceramic voltage outputs can reduce the influence of non-uniform pressure on the skin friction output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]