High speed voltage regulator with integrated loseless current sensing

Abstract

In general, in one aspect, the disclosure describes a high-speed multi-phase voltage regulator (VR) capable of sensing load current. For each phase leg, the VR includes a current mirror to mirror current in switching elements, a current sense to sense high side current in the current mirror, and a I-V converter to convert the sensed high side current to a voltage. The high side sensed current for each phase leg is averaged and the duty cycle for the VR is extracted. The average high side sensed current and the duty cycle are converted to digital by an A-D converter. Digital circuitry corrects the sensed current by adjusting for the gain and offset voltage of the VR. The adjusted sensed value is divided by the duty cycle to convert to load current and the average load current is multiplied by the number of phases operating to determine overall load current.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.