Investigation Into Static and Dynamic Performance of the Copper Trace Current Sense Method

摘要

This paper investigates the static and dynamic performance of current sense methods, which exploit the resistive voltage drop across the current carrying copper trace. This approach promises very low cost since no dedicated shunt resistor is required, no additional power losses occur and no extra space on the printed-circuit-board (PCB) is necessary. A microcontroller can be used to calibrate the copper trace resistance and implement a temperature drift compensation by means of a temperature sensor. Given that today almost every electronic device has at least one microcontroller that can provide the small computation power required for this current sensing technique, the additional cost of such a technique is small.