LTC4260
11
4260fc
For more information www.linear.com/LTC4260
TiMing DiagraM
operaTion
The Functional Diagram displays the main functional areas
of this device. The LTC4260 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 charge pump
and gate driver turn on the external N-channel pass FET’s
gate to pass power to the load. The gate driver uses a
charge pump that derives its power from the SOURCE pin.
When the SOURCE pin is at ground, the charge pump is
powered from an internal 12V supply derived from V
DD
.
This results in a 200µA current load on the SOURCE pin
when the gate is up. Also included in the gate driver is an
internal 15V gate-to-source clamp.
The current sense (CS) amplifier monitors the load cur-
rent using the difference between the V
DD
and SENSE pin
voltage. The CS amplifier limits the current in the load by
reducing the GATE-to-SOURCE voltage in an active control
loop. The CS amplifier requires 100µA input bias current
from both the V
DD
and the SENSE pins.
A short circuit on the output to ground causes significant
power
dissipation during active current limiting. To limit
this power, the foldback amplifier reduces the current limit
value from 50mV to 20mV (referred to the V
DD
minus
SENSE voltage) in a linear manner as the FB pin drops
below 2V (see Typical Performance curves).
If an overcurrent condition persists, the TIMER pin ramps
up with a 100µA current source until the pin voltage
exceeds 1.2V (comparator TM2). This indicates to the
logic that it is time to turn off the pass FET to prevent
overheating. At this point the TIMER pin ramps down us-
ing the 2µA current source until the voltage drops below
t
SU, DAT
t
SU, STO
t
SU, STA
t
BUF
t
HD, STA
t
SP
t
SP
t
HD, DATO,
t
HD, DATI
t
HD, STA
START
STOP
REPEATED START
START
4260 TD01
SDAI/SDAO
SCL
0.2V (comparator TM1) which tells the logic that the pass
transistor has cooled and it is safe to turn it on again.
The output voltage is monitored using the FB pin and the
PG comparator to determine if the power is available for
the load. The power good condition is signalled by the
GPIO pin using an open-drain pull-down transistor. The
GPIO pin can also be used as a general purpose input (GP
comparator) or output pin.
The Functional Diagram shows the monitoring blocks of
the LTC4260. The group of comparators on the left side
includes the UV, OV, RST, BP and ON comparators. These
comparators are used to determine if the external condi-
tions are valid prior to turning on the FET. But first the
two undervoltage lockout circuits UVLO1 and UVLO2 must
validate the input supply and the internally generated 5.5V
supply (INTV
CC
) and generate the power up initialization
to the logic circuits.
Included in the LTC4260 is an 8-bit A/D converter. The
converter has a 3-input mux to select between the ADIN
pin, the SOURCE pin and the V
DD
– SENSE voltage.
An I
2
C interface is provided to read the A/D registers. It also
allows the host to poll the device and determine if faults
have occurred. If the ALERT line is used as an interrupt,
the host can respond to a fault in real time. The typical SDA
line is divided into an SDAI (input) and SDAO (output).
This simplifies applications using an optoisolator driven
directly from the SDAO output. The I
2
C device address is
decoded using the ADR0, ADR1 and ADR2 pins. These
inputs have three states each that decode into a total of
27 device addresses.
