North American Philips Corporation

Brian C Martin

Jeffrey Alma West

Alma Stephenson Anderson

Harold Garth Hanson

Output overvoltage protection circuitry for circuits operating at low voltages (e.g., 3 v) interfacing to a higher voltage operating circuit (e.g., 5 v bus). To prevent problems with a pull-up PMOS device at the output when the bus is pulled-up to the higher voltage, a voltage node is provided in the circuit which follows the output voltage or the low supply voltage, whichever is higher, and a sub-circuit is provided to generate logic signals indicating when the bus is pulled too high. The PMOS device is then shut-down to prevent damage to the circuit.

Overvoltage control circuitry

A BiCMOS power driver circuit for interfacing to a bus comprises circuitry for channelling current from a power source to the base of a bipolar device to pull the output all the way down to within a bipolar V.sub.SAT voltage drop of ground, and then uses feedback to turn-off the pull-down circuit to conserve power. A similar circuit functions to provide Incident Wave Switching and Glitch Suppression by monitoring the voltage level at the output and sinking current as necessary to maintain a low logic level.

BiCMOS output driver with reduced static power consumption

A BiCMOS line driver that incorporates a fully-powered, zero- static power pull-down driver with a standard BiCMOS pullup in a novel parallel input signal path construction having substantially equal propagation delays to create a complementary signal driver with very high speed and extremely low skew in propagation.

Growing community of inventors

Los Alamos, NM, United States of America

Brian C Martin