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:
Jan. 16, 2007
Filed:
Mar. 31, 2004
William Gene Durbin, Austin, TX (US);
Brent Wilson, Austin, TX (US);
William Gene Durbin, Austin, TX (US);
Brent Wilson, Austin, TX (US);
Silicon Labs CP, Inc., Austin, TX (US);
Abstract
A magnetic stripe card reader for reading a magnetic stripe on a card having at least one track of magnetically stored information stored thereon as a stream of encoded discrete data bits separated by bit times is disclosed. Aa magnetic head is provided for reading the magnetic pulses as the magnetic stripe is passed thereby to output a time varying analog signal. A data converter incorporated on an integrated circuit is then operable for converting the analog signal to a digital time series of digital values. A processor incorporated on the integrated circuit can ten process the digital output of the data converter and is operable to first determine potential bit boundaries and then recover timing information from the digital time series to discriminate the bit times between data bits. The value of each data bit is then determined during each bit time to provide a stream of extracted data bits.