Necessary Bandwidth of Current Shunt Amplifier

amplifierbandwidthcurrent measurement

I want to measure a bidirectional current using a Shunt and Current-Shunt Amplifier in High Side topology.
The ADC will work at a lower sample rate (<10 kSpS) than would be required for the faster parts of the signal (up to 500 kHz). Therefore a low pass filter between Amplifier and ADC will be used to prevent aliasing.

  1. Would an Amplifier with a Bandwidth smaller than than the fast signal components but larger than the sampling rate suffice (without a noticeable impact on the measuring)?
    The bandwidth of most Current-Shunt Amplifiers seem to be in the range of 100 kHz to 400 kHz.
  2. Or do I need a Current-Shunt Amplifier with a Bandwidth of >= 500 kHz for this?
  3. I am not sure here if the Amplifier behaviour can be regarded as a low pass filter like the frequency response suggests. See the Gain vs Frequency plot of the LTC6104 for example (Page 4).

One reason I am asking is, that so far I only found Current-Shunt Amplifiers with a Gain of >= 50 but low bandwidth available in stock. The LT1999 for example has a high bandwidth and is available with a Gain of 50 but needs to be sourced directly from LT or as non-stock from Digikey.

Best Answer

What you need to do is put a low-pass filter on the input of the shunt amplifier. Then use a shunt amplifier with a bandwidth greater than the bandwidth of the signal you're going to send to the ADC (roughly 5 kHz in this case). Note that the amplifier should not be right on the edge in terms of frequency response. If you feed high-frequency signals into an amplifier without the necessary frequency response, you can get all sorts of weird, disgusting, and puzzling problems with the output. If nothing else, you can get input diodes or transistor junctions actually rectifying portions of the signal, and things just go downhill from there.