Qualcomm Incorporated

Mingcheng Zhu

Anatoly Gelman

Amit Aneja

Felipe Regis Goncalves Cabral

Aspects of the disclosure are directed to voltage sensing for safety-critical applications. In accordance with one aspect, the disclosure includes a multi-phase ring oscillator (RO) configured to operate in a first voltage domain; a frequency counter coupled to the multi-phase RO, the frequency counter configured to accumulate a plurality of phase cycles from the multi-phase RO over a time duration to generate a digital count word; an alarm processor coupled to the frequency counter, the alarm processor configured to receive an alarm state signal from the frequency counter; and a heartbeat detector coupled to the multi-phase RO, the heartbeat detector configured to operate in a second voltage domain and configured to detect a periodic recurrence of a heartbeat pulse to determine an integrity of the sensor function as a whole and alarm state signal in particular.

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San Diego, CA, United States of America

Mingcheng Zhu