On the utility of common-mode and differential-mode noise input filters

Adolfo Garcia - June 17, 2013 As many of our customers know, Touchstone Semiconductor develops a line of highperformance, high-side current-sense amplifiers. As background, high-side current-sense amplifiers have been around since the 20th century. An example of an old-school currentsense amplifier using either an operational amplifier or an instrumentation amplifier is shown in Figure 1. The amplifier circuit is wired across the RSENSE using a 4-resistor configuration that level shifts the current-shunt signal into the op amps common-mode range and while amplifying the current-shunt signal to appear at VOUT. Note that in this application, the current shunt is used to measure the bulk +12V load current as it is distributed to one or more point-of-load buck dc/dc converters. In Figure 2, Touchstone Semi applies 21st-Century design and product techniques that offer a simpler, more accurate, and better value solution.

Figure 1: High-side Current-Sensing in the 20th Century

Figure 2: High-side Current Sensing in the 21st Century (or, in other words how its now done Downtown!) The old-school method was faced with many challenges: (a) so-so to ok CMR (so-so if R1 R4 were discrete; ok if R1 - R4 were well-matched and judicious use of trimmer caps was applied to improve ac CMR), (b) not-so-high-performance amplifier VOS, (c) poor gain match, and (d) high op amp supply current). If the CSA circuit were operating downstream from a bulk dc/dc converter and upstream from a POL dc/dc converter (as shown here), switching dc/dc converter transients would also bugger up accurate current measurements because the op amps bipolar transistor input stage would rectify ac transients causing a shift in the op amps VOS thus, the need to use common-mode and differential-mode filters (R1a, R1b, C1a, C2b, and C2). On the other hand, really clever circuit design as shown in Figure 2 eliminated all the circuit challenges while reducing the circuits overall IC footprint to a SOT23, improving the ac and dc CMR to 80dB, reducing the amplifiers referred-to-input VOS by at least 2.5x, and reducing the circuits overall supply current by at least 50x. Youll note as well that ac and dc common-mode filtering components were incorporated into the new CSAs, further increasing value and system performance. In the presence of out-of-band transient noise, the performance of either circuit is enhanced

through the use of these common- and differential-mode filters. While the Touchstone Semi CSAs embed these filters into the IC, its always useful to return to 1st principles. Focusing only on the discrete input filters in Figure 1, here are todays questions for our loyal and inquisitive readers:

1) Which components comprise the common-mode input filters? 2) Which components comprise the differential-mode inputs filters? 3) For a given overall signal bandwidth and choice for amplifier, where would you position the cutoff frequency for the common-mode filters? For the differential-mode filters? 4) What observations can you offer regarding the application of common- and differentialmode input filters like the ones shown here?