Hot swap controller and its control strategy design

A hot swap controller was developed to ensure the safe insertion and removal of a circuit board from a live backplane. Multi protections of both board and backplane were proposed and realized in this design, which includes automatically starting current limiting or circuit breaking in the event of over current faults and driving an SCR crowbar to protect the loads in the event of over input voltage faults. In addition, the under-voltage detecting and output voltage monitoring is also available for its use. A lot of efforts were put into the design and optimization of its control strategy since the performance of the circuit depends it strongly. The simulation results are well consistent with the expectations. This IC could be realized in BCD technology (Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS technology).