one of the more involved designs I've done in a while
@gsuberland I’m curious, how do you learn to build complex stuff like this? I’m starting from the point of a barely remembered A level in electronics, unused for anything more complex than wiring a temperature sensor up to an ESP8266 for the last 20 odd years.
@jon it's mostly practice and learning about the building blocks in isolation, and working from reference designs as a starting point when you're working with a new IC.
while this schematic looks complicated, it's largely just a bunch of common configurations of parts stuck together, with some parasitic inductances in series to account for how it would behave on a real PCB.
@jon so for example here I've got an SFFM voltage source to emulate spread spectrum switching noise, in series with a pulse source which is configured to act like a DC supply with a ramp-up time.
then there's a pi filter (cap, inductor, cap) to filter out supply noise. this is useful to simulate here because the response of the filter may lead to oscillation as the LTC4370 tries to balance power across the two supplies.
then it's mostly the LTC4370 reference design, with some tweaks.
@jon the main changes I made were tweaking the compensation capacitors and using parallel FETs on the second stage, adding a pi filter stage between to help avoid the two sets of control loops from over-compensating and oscillating, tweaking the current sense shunt resistances slightly, and the enable circuits (NPN threshold circuit + RC filter). the output side just simulates a load.