Current Sense Circuit Collection
Making Sense of Current
Tim Regan, Editor
This Application Note Will Change
Sensing and/or controlling current flow is a fundamental requirement in many electronics systems, and the tech-niques to do so are as diverse as the applications them-selves. This Application Note compiles solutions to cur-rent sensing problems and organizes the solutions by general application type. These circuits have been culled from a variety of Linear Technology documents.
This Application Note is a growing and changing docu-ment. Many of the chapters listed below are placeholders for material that will be filled in soon. As the chapters are added, their links will be enabled.
Using the Application Note
Click the name of a chapter in the “Circuit Collection In-dex” below to open the PDF version of that chapter.
Circuits Organized by General Application
Each chapter collects together applications that tend to solve a similar general problem, such as high side cur-rent sensing, or negative supply sensing. The chapters are titled accordingly (see “Circuit Collection Index” be-low). In this way, the reader has access to many possible solutions to a particular problem in one place.
Contributors
Jon Munson, Alexi Sevastopoulos, Greg Zimmer, Michael Stokowski , LTC, LTM, LT, Burst Mode, OPTI-LOOP, Over-The-Top and PolyPhase are registered trademarks of Linear Technology Corporation. Adaptive Power, C-Load, DirectSense, Easy Drive, FilterCAD, Hot Swap, LinearView, μModule, Micropower SwitcherCAD, Multimode Dimming, No Latency ΔΣ, No Latency Delta-Sigma, No RSENSE, Operational Filter, PanelPro-tect, PowerPath, PowerSOT, SmartStart, SoftSpan, Stage Shedding, SwitcherCAD, ThinSOT, UltraFast and VLDO are trademarks of Linear Technology Corporation. Other product names may be trademarks of the companies that manufacture the products.
It is unlikely that any particular circuit shown will exactly meet the requirements for a specific design, but the sug-gestion of many circuit techniques and devices should prove useful. Specific circuits may appear in several chapters if they have broad application.