The shunt reference is always used in conjunction with a resistor. An incoming transient, as seen in the graph on the left on this slide, will not damage the shunt reference, since most of the energy is dissipated in the resistor. On the other hand, such spikes increase the application power dissipation as the two diagrams on the right side show. In this example, at an input voltage of 5 V the current through the shunt increases to 30 µA when compared to an input of 2.6 V and a corresponding current of only 1.2 µA. In case of a series reference, the output is isolated from the input by a buffer so the additional difference between input and output voltage will not result in increased input current. Therefore, the power consumption of a system with a continuous input of 5 V to the voltage reference would benefit from the use of a series reference.