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US 5,517,470 AGranted
Nonvolatile control architecture
AssigneeDallas Semiconductor Corporation
InventorsGary V. Zanders, Francis A. Scherpenberg, Kevin E. Deierling
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A digital rheostat or potentiometer which provides both increment and decrement operations from a single input such as a pushbutton. A certain pattern of input actuations will cause the direction of change to reverse. Settings of the potentiometer are stored in nonvolatile memory.
Claims1
A nonvolatile memory cell, comprising:
- (a) a tunneling node;
- (b) a control node;
- (c) a floating node;
- (d) a tunneling capacitor coupling said tunneling node to said floating node;
- (e) a control capacitor coupling said control node to said floating node, said control capacitor of capacitance larger than the capacitance of said tunneling capacitor;
- (f) a voltage polarity switch connected to said tunneling node and to said control node, said switch having at least a first state and a second state of operation with the voltage from said tunneling node to said control node being positive when said switch is in said first state and with said voltage being negative when said switch is in said second state;
- (g) whereby programming and erasing said floating node may both are performed through said tunneling capacitor by selection of the polarity of the voltage from said tunneling node to said control node.
4 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.