The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jun. 02, 1998
Filed:
Mar. 31, 1997
U.S. Philips Corporation, New York, NY (US);
Abstract
Very high resistance values may be necessary in integrated circuits, for example in the gigaohm range, for example for realizing RC times of 1 ms to 1 s. Such resistance values cannot or substantially not be realized by known methods in standard i.c. processes because of the too large space occupation. In addition, known embodiments are usually strongly dependent on the temperature. According to the invention, therefore, two zener diodes (10, 4; 11, 4) connected back-to-back are used as the resistor. The current through each zener diode is mainly determined by band--band tunneling when the voltage is not too high, for example up to approximately 0.2 V. This current has a value such that resistors in the giga range can be readily realized on a small surface area. Since the current is mainly determined by intrinsic material properties of silicon, the temperature dependence is very small. The resistor may furthermore be manufactured in any standard CMOS process or bipolar process.