US Patent 7453678 Power interruption system for electronic circuit breaker

A system and method for controlling an electronic circuit breaker prevents the circuit breaker from contributing its own delay to a power interruption time window on a load. A monitor coupled to a control processor in the circuit breaker causes the control processor to operate in a low-energy consumption sleep mode if it detects a power interruption. During the sleep mode, the control processor draws current from an energy storage device until the power source is reconnected to the control processor. Because the control processor operation is suspended rather than stopped during the power interruption, the control processor does not need to conduct any preliminary power up operations when power is resumed.