Apple patent is for method, apparatus for measuring output current of a switching regulator
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Oct 9, 2008 at 1:20pm
An Apple patent (number 20080246460) for a method and apparatus for measuring the output current of a switching regulator has appeared at the US Patent & Trademark Office. invention relates to techniques for determining the power consumption of an electronic device, such as an integrated circuit (IC) chip.
More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for determining the power consumption of an electronic device by measuring an average output current generated by a switching regulator that supplies power to the electronic device. One embodiment of the present invention provides an apparatus that measures the average-output-current produced by a switching regulator within an electronic device.
The apparatus includes current-sensing-circuitry coupled to a switching field-effect-transistor (FET) within the switching regulator, wherein the current-sensing-circuitry is configured to bypass a small sense current from the conducting current of the switching-FET according to a sense ratio, wherein the conducting current is controlled by a control signal for the switching regulator. The apparatus also includes a current-to-voltage-converter coupled to the current-sensing-circuitry which is configured to convert the sense current into a sense voltage.
The apparatus further includes voltage-averaging-circuitry which is configured to produce an average-sense-voltage from the sense voltage. This sense voltage is coupled to the input of the voltage-average-circuitry through a switch, which is gated by the control signal. The average-output-current of the switching regulator is indicated by the average-sense-voltage. The inventor is Eric Smith.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
