The UC3914 family of Hot Swap Power Managers provides complete power management, hot swap and fault handling capability. Integrating this part and a few external components, allows a board to be swapped in or out upon failure or system modification without removing power to the hardware, while maintaining the integrity of the powered system. Complementary output drivers and diodes have been integrated for use with external capacitors as a charge pump to ensure sufficient gate drive to the external NMOS transistor for low RDS(on). All control and housekeeping functions are integrated and externally programmable and include the fault current level, maximum output sourcing current, maximum fault time and average power limiting of the external FET. The UC3914 features a duty ratio current limiting technique, which provides peak load capability while limiting the average power dissipation of the external pass transistor during fault conditions. The fault level is fixed at 50mV with respect to VCC to minimize total dropout. The fault current level is set with an external current sense resistor. The maximum allowable sourcing current is programmed by using a resistor divider from VCC to REF to set the voltage on IMAX. The maximum current level, when the output appears as a current source is (VCC VIMAX)/RSENSE. |