LTC4281
12
Rev. A
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OPERATION
The LTC4281 is designed to turn a board’s supply voltage
on and off in a controlled manner, allowing the board to be
safely inserted or removed from a live backplane. During
normal operation, the gate driver turns on an external
N-channel MOSFET to pass power to the load. The gate
driver uses a charge pump that derives its power from
the VDD pin. Also included in the gate driver is 12.5V
GATE-to-SOURCE clamp to protect the oxide of the exter-
nal MOSFET. During start-up the inrush current is tightly
controlled by using current limit foldback.
The current limit (CL) amplifier monitors the load cur-
rent with a current sense resistor connected between the
SENSE
+
and SENSE
–
pins. The CL amplifier limits the cur-
rent in the load by pulling back on the GATE-to-SOURCE
voltage in an active control loop when the sense voltage
exceeds the commanded value.
An overcurrent fault at the output may result in excessive
MOSFET power dissipation during active current limiting.
To limit this power, the CL amplifier regulates the voltage
between the SENSE+ and SENSE– pins at the value set in
the ILIM register. When the output (SOURCE pin) is low,
power dissipation is further reduced by folding back the
current limit to 30% of nominal.
The TIMER pin ramps up with 20μA when the current
limit circuit is active. The LTC4281 turns off the GATE and
registers a fault when the TIMER pin reaches its 1.28V
threshold. At this point the TIMER pin ramps down using
a 5μA current source until the voltage drops below 0.2V
(comparator TM1). The TIMER pin will then ramp up and
down 256 times with 20µA/5µA before indicating that
the external MOSFET has cooled and it is safe to turn on
again, provided overcurrent auto-retry is enabled.
The output voltage is monitored using the SOURCE pin
and the power good (PG) comparator to determine if the
power is available for the load. The power good condi-
tion can be signaled by the GPIO1 pin. The GPIO1 pin
may also be configured to signal power bad, as a general
purpose input (GP comparator), or a general purpose
open-drainoutput.
GPIO2 and GPIO3 may also be configured as general
purpose inputs or general purpose open-drain outputs.
Additionally, the ADC measures these pins with a 1.28V
full-scale. GPIO2 may be configured to pull low to indicate
that the external MOSFET is in a state of stress when the
MOSFET is commanded to be on and either the gate volt-
age is lower than it should be or the DRAIN-to-SOURCE
voltage exceeds 200mV.
The Functional Diagram shows the monitoring blocks of
the LTC4281. The group of comparators on the left side
includes the undervoltage (UV), overvoltage (OV), and
(ON) comparators. These comparators determine if the
external conditions are valid prior to turning on the GATE.
But first the two undervoltage lockout circuits, UVLO1
and UVLO2, validate the input supply and the internally
generated 3.3V supply, INTVCC. UVLO2 also generates
the power-up initialization to the logic circuits and copies
the contents of the EEPROM to operating memory after
INTVCC crosses this rising threshold.
Included in the LTC4281 is a pair of 12 to 16-bit A/D
converters. One data converter continuously monitors the
ADC+ to ADC– voltage, sampling every 16µs and produc-
ing a 12-bit result of the average current sense voltage
every 65ms. The other data converter is synchronized to
the first one and measures the GPIO voltage and SOURCE
voltage during the same time period. Every time the ADCs
finish taking a measurement, the current sense voltage
is multiplied by the measurement of the SOURCE pin to
provide a power measurement. Every time power is mea-
sured, it is added to an energy accumulator which keeps
track of how much energy has been transmitted to the
load. The energy accumulator can generate an optional
alert upon overflow, and can be preset to allow it to over-
flow after a given amount of energy has been transmit-
ted. A time accumulator also keeps track of how many
times the power meter has been incremented; dividing
the results of the energy accumulator by the time accu-
mulator gives the average system power. The minimum
and maximum measurements of GPIO, SOURCE, ADC+
to ADC– and POWER are stored, and optional alerts may
be generated if a measurement is above or below user
configurable 8-bit thresholds.
An internal EEPROM provides nonvolatile configuration
of the LTC4281’s behavior, records fault information and
provides four bytes of uncommitted memory for general
purpose storage.