When the output voltage is greater than approximately 6 V and the duty cycle at minimum input voltage is greater than approximately 50%, the designer must exercise caution in selection of the output filter components. When an application designed to these specific operating conditions is subjected to a current limit fault condition, it can be possible to observe a large hysteresis in the current limit. This can affect the output voltage of the device until the load current is reduced sufficiently to allow the current limit protection circuit to reset itself.

Under current limiting conditions, the LM267x is designed to respond in the following manner:

1. At the moment when the inductor current reaches the current limit threshold, the ON-pulse is immediately terminated. This happens for any application condition.
2. However, the current limit block is also designed to momentarily reduce the duty cycle to below 50% to avoid subharmonic oscillations, which can cause the inductor to saturate.
3. Thereafter, after the inductor current falls below the current limit threshold, there is a small relaxation time during which the duty cycle progressively rises back above 50% to the value required to achieve regulation.

If the output capacitance is sufficiently large, it can be possible that as the output tries to recover. The output capacitor charging current is large enough to repeatedly re-trigger the current limit circuit before the output has fully settled. This condition is exacerbated with higher output voltage settings because the energy requirement of the output capacitor varies as the square of the output voltage (½ CV²), thus requiring an increased charging current.

A simple test to determine if this condition can exist for a suspect application is to apply a short circuit across the output of the converter, then remove the shorted output condition. In an application with properly selected external components, the output recovers smoothly.

Practical values of external components that have been experimentally found to work well under these specific operating conditions are C_OUT = 47 µF, L = 22 µH. Note that even with these components, for a current limit of I_CLIM of the device, the maximum load current under which the possibility of the large current limit hysteresis can be minimized, is I_CLIM / 2. For example, if the input is 24 V and the set output voltage is 18 V, then for a desired maximum current of 1.5 A, the current limit of the chosen switcher must be confirmed to be at least 3 A.

Under extreme overcurrent or short-circuit conditions, the LM267x employs frequency foldback in addition to the current limit. If the cycle-by-cycle inductor current increases above the current limit threshold (due to short circuit or inductor saturation for example), the switching frequency is automatically reduced to protect the IC. Frequency below 100 kHz is typical for an extreme short-circuit condition.