Resettable electronic fuse protects hot-plug computer peripherals from faults

The AP91352 electronic fuse from Diodes Incorporated provides protection from fault conditions that could result in catastrophic equipment failure. It targets applications in consumer products such as plug-and-play hard disk drives, solid-state drives and similar hot-plug computer applications, as well as manufacturers of motherboards, printers and servers. The AP91352 provides undervoltage lockout, overvoltage clamp, thermal shutdown and reverse-current protection for downstream power components to prevent damage and premature component failure. A further key benefit of the AP91352 is its operation as a resettable fuse that allows the protected application to restart after the fault condition has cleared. This enhances overall system reliability and reduces the number of field returns of the end product. The protection capability of the AP91352 is enhanced with a wide, stable operating voltage from 3.6V to 12V. Power losses are reduced with an integrated NMOS power device that has a low RDS(ON) of typically 50mO and through the use of an internal current limit circuit that avoids the voltage drop which results from having an external current sense resistor in the load path. The device is offered in a small, standard pin-out, low-profile W-DFN3020-12 package that reduces application footprints.