Abstract

Vehicle electronic fault detection is an important capability implemented in vehicles today to report what specific fault has occurred in an electronic system. This fault detection allows the vehicle to communicate the detected fault through LED indicators on the cluster, the onboard diagnostics port (OBD), and potentially over a wireless Wi-Fi®, 4GLTE, or 5G connection. Currently, the TPS9261x-Q1 family of devices features built in fault detection for open load (OL), short to ground (SG), short to battery (SB), and overtemperature (OT) faults that can occur on the LED driver output. However; there is only a single generic fault output to signal when any of the previously-listed faults have occurred in the system and therefore no way for the local MCU to distinguish what specific fault has taken place. This application note demonstrates a cost-effective method to implement a discrete fault detection circuit to report what specific fault has occurred on the TPS9261x-Q1 output to a local MCU.