SST (Microchip) Assigned Patent

Silicon Storage Technology, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microchip, has been assigned a patent (8,232,833) developed by five co-inventors for a "charge pump systems and methods."

The co-inventors are Hieu Van Tran, San Jose, CA, Sang Thanh Nguyen, Fremont, CA, Nasrin Jaffari, Sunnyvale, CA, Hung Quoc Nguyen, Fremont, CA, and Anh Ly, San Jose, CA

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "Digital multilevel memory systems and methods include a charge pump for generating regulated high voltages for various memory operations. The charge pump may include a plurality of pump stages. Aspects of exemplary systems may include charge pumps that performs orderly charging and discharging at low voltage operation conditions. Additional aspects may include features that enable state by state pumping, for example, circuitry that avoids cascaded short circuits among pump stages. Each pump stage may also include circuitry that discharges its nodes, such as via self-discharge through associated pump interconnection(s). Further aspects may also include features that: assist power-up in the various pump stages, double voltage, shift high voltage levels, provide anti-parallel circuit configurations, and/or enable buffering or precharging features, such as self-buffering and self-precharging circuitry."

The patent application was filed on May 23, 2007 (11/805,765).