Inrush current limiting with a low-side switch and a POR chip

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Hello all, I've been pretty busy with stuff outside of electronics but recently I have been working on a design that needs to run from 0-32V and also needs to be hot-pluggable(It's a general purpose props/animatronics/lighting/sensors/control board).

The problem I've been having in the simulations is that stray inductance combined with inrush into the capacitors keeps pushing the voltage at the input of my switcher 5-25 volts over the supply for a few milliseconds when I hot plug it(in the simulation).

Since I don't want to use a grossly overprovisioned regulator, and I want to keep the parts count and cost down, and I would rather not use any aluminum capacitors
(size,lifetime,temperature range), the solution I am thinking of is to use a low-side switch on the power input, bypassed with a 4.7-22 ohm precharge resistor. Then I would put one of those little voltage-detect supervisors to detect when the DC-DC converter output is stable, and turn on the low side switch a few milliseconds later after the capacitor has had time to charge fully.

I'm also a little worried about hot UNplug transients caused by someone unplugging a board while it is drawing current but the input cap should be able to absorb that because the boards are pretty low power.


I was going to use one of ON semi's protected mosfets to avoid any ESD issues(This is going to be an open source design and I don't want to include any difficult to work with parts)

So what do you think? Is this a valid idea? I'm pretty sure it will work but i want to know if there are any issues I am not aware of.
 
Hi,

They do make inrush current limiting thermistors. Perhaps you could search for one of those.

I dont see why a MOSFET would not work here though.
 
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