JAJSHK0B NOVEMBER 2008 – June 2019 TPS40197
PRODUCTION DATA.
A short circuit in the TPS40197 is detected by sensing the voltage drop across the low-side FET when it is on, and across the high-side FET when it is on. If the voltage drop across either FET exceeds the short-circuit threshold in any given switching cycle, a counter increments one count. If the voltage across the high-side FET was higher than the short circuit threshold, that FET is turned off early. If the voltage drop across either FET does not exceed the short circuit threshold during a cycle, the counter is decremented for that cycle. If the counter fills up (a count of 7) a fault condition is declared and the drivers turn off both MOSFETs. After a timeout of approximately 50 ms, the controller attempts to restart. If a short circuit continues at the output, the current quickly ramps up to the short-circuit threshold and another fault condition is declared and the process of waiting for the 50 ms and attempting to restart repeats. The low-side threshold increases as the low-side on time decreases due to blanking time and comparator response time. See Figure 9 for changes in the threshold as the low-side FET conduction time decreases.
The TPS40197 provides three selectable short-circuit protection thresholds for the low-side FET: 100 mV, 200 mV, and 280 mV. The particular threshold is selected by connecting a resistor from COMP to GND. Table 1 shows the short-circuit thresholds for corresponding resistors from COMP to GND. When designing the compensation for the feedback loop, remember that a low impedance compensation network combined with a long network time constant can cause the short-circuit threshold setting to not be as expected. The time constant and impedance of the network connected from COMP to FB must be as in Equation 1 to ensure no interaction with the short-circuit threshold setting.
where
COMPARATOR RESISTANCE
RCOMP (kΩ) |
CURRENT LIMIT THRESHOLD
VOLTAGE VILIM (mV) |
---|---|
12 ±10% | 280 |
OPEN | 200 |
4 ±10% | 100 |
The range of expected short-circuit current thresholds is shown in Equation 2 and Equation 3.
where
Note that due to blanking time considerations, overcurrent threshold accuracy may fall off for duty cycle greater than 75% because the overcurrent comparator has only a very short time to sample the SW pin voltage under these conditions and may not have time to respond to voltages very near the threshold.
The short-circuit protection threshold for the high-side MOSFET is fixed at 550 mV typical, 400 mV minimum. This threshold is in place to provide a maximum current output using pulse-by-pulse current limit in the case of a fault. The pulse terminates when the voltage drop across the high-side FET exceeds the short-circuit threshold. The maximum amount of current that can be specified to be sourced from a converter can be found by Equation 4.
where
If the required current from the converter is greater than the calculated IOUT(max), a lower resistance high-side MOSFET must be chosen. Both the high-side and low-side thresholds use temperature compensation to approximate the change in resistance for a typical power MOSFET. This helps counteract shifts in overcurrent thresholds as temperature increases. For this to be effective, the MOSFETs and the device must be well coupled thermally.