Skyworks Solutions, Inc.

Psemi Corporation

Rf Magic, Inc.

Keith J Rampmeier

Alyosha C Molnar

Rahul Magoon

Robert Mark Englekirk

Keith Bargroff

Buddhika Abesingha

Bert L Fransis

Stephen L Lloyd

Raducu Lazarescu

Esa Tarvainen

Tony Mellissonos

Donghai Wang

Arpita Moghe Chadha

Kostas Papathanasiou

Keith P Bargroff

Tony Mellissinos

Kosta Papathanasiou

Methods and devices to decrease the power consumption of level shifters in the absence of input power supply are disclosed. The described devices include current mirrors that are inactive when the level shifter is in the HIGH or LOW steady state. The disclosed methods further include a delay element used to keep the power consumption low in the case of slow input power supply ramps.

Low power level shifter

Circuits and methods for determining the characteristics of swappable pins in a peripheral in a 1-Wire or similar single-conductor system, thereby allowing each one of two pins to be either an I/O pin (connected to an I/O line) or a CAP pin (connected to a storage capacitor). Embodiments may utilize a hybrid buffer circuit that utilizes an effectively bi-directional PFET pull-up device coupled between the swappable pins A and B. Two open-drain NFETs pull-down devices are used, one on either side of the PFET and coupled to a respective pin (A or B), but with only one NFET being selected to be operable based on pin-determination flag signals from the pin detection circuitry. Such a hybrid buffer circuit would consume significantly less IC area than two complete conventional buffers, resulting in less leakage and less yield loss.

Output buffer for a swappable single conductor interface

An N&#xd7;M crosspoint switch allows a signal from any one of the N inputs to be routed to one or more of the M crosspoint switch outputs. The switches within the crosspoint switch can be configured as voltage mode or current mode switches. In voltage mode switching an input to the crosspoint switch is provided to an input device, such as an amplifier, having a low output impedance. The output of the low impedance device is provided to a switch that connects the output of the low impedance device to a high input impedance device, such as a band translation device. In current mode switching, the low impedance output of the input device is connected to selectively activated high isolation transconductance devices having high input impedances. The outputs of the transconductance devices are connected to low impedance devices that operate as summing nodes.

NxM crosspoint switch with band translation

A receiver front end is provided with a low-noise amplifier (LNA), a linearity on demand (LOD) circuit, and a gain calibration device. The LOD circuit provides current to the LNA depending on linearity requirements. The gain calibration device monitors the amount of current provided by the LOD circuit to the LNA and provides signals to help compensate for variations in the LNA's gain due to the variations in the current supplied to the LNA by the LOD circuit. The compensation signals may be used to adjust the gain of a variable-gain amplifier, or may comprise compensation parameters usable by a digital signal processor, to compensate for the gain variations.

Gain compensation

An apparatus for modifying a radio frequency signal includes a mixer core, an input circuit and an interface circuit. The mixer core receives a first signal having a first frequency and a second signal having a second frequency, and outputs a third signal which is a function of the first and second signals. The input circuit sets a predetermined bias current, receives a radio frequency (RF) signal and inputs the RF signal into the mixer core. The interface circuit is interposed between the mixer core and the input circuit. The interface circuit receives the bias current and input it to the mixer core. In one embodiment, the input circuit includes a transistor and the interface circuit includes a transformer.

Mixer circuit with on-chip transformer

A mixing system divides a local oscillator (&ldquo;LO&rdquo;) signal into two signals having a predetermined phase difference, mixes each of the two signal with an input signal to produce a mixed signal, and then combines the mixed signals to produce an output signal having substantially no third-order mixing products.

Harmonic cancellation mixer

Growing community of inventors

Costa Mesa, CA, United States of America

Keith J Rampmeier