Abstract: The present invention relates to estimating a battery current supplied from a battery to a switching power supply, which provides a regulated output signal to a load, based on a switching power supply current in the switching power supply, and then controlling the regulated output signal to limit the battery current to within an acceptable threshold. The switching power supply current may be provided by one or more switching elements in the switching power supply. The switching elements may be mirrored to provide a mirrored switching power supply current, which is used to estimate the battery current. The estimated battery current may include an estimated average battery current, an estimated instantaneous battery current, or both.

Abstract: The present invention is a phase dithered digital communications system that includes a digital receiver, and uses phase dithering to spread the energy of one or more system clocks to minimize receiver de-sensitization. Phase dithering uses a single frequency for each system clock; however, the energy of each system clock is spread over a range of frequencies by changing the duty-cycle of each clock half-cycle. A non-phase dithered clock drives the sampling clock of a receiver analog-to-digital converter to provide accurate correlation with received information, which may allow use of a higher frequency sampling clock than in frequency dithered designs. Phase dithered clocks and non-phase dithered clocks may have constant frequencies that are related to each other by a ratio of two integers; therefore, the time base used for extracting received data is always correlated and accurate.