Appeal No. 1996-3113
Application 08/099,243
The Examiner has withdrawn the rejection of claims 13 through
17, 20 and 21 in the Examiner’s Answer, paper no. 16.
Therefore, only the rejection of claims 18 and 19 remains
before us. Both amendments after final rejection have not
been entered, that includes an amendment proposed in Paper No.
11, and the amendment proposed and included with the Appeal
Brief, Paper No. 15.
Appellants’ invention relates to controlling the
saturation of a bipolar power transistor by sensing the
substrate current, and accordingly controlling the power
transistor’s base current. In particular, in Figure 3, when
power transistor T1 operates in saturation, the voltage across
sensing resistor R (produced by substrate current I ) exceedsS S
reference voltage V . As a consequence, OP1 generates an
S
output current that is fed to an input of the operational
amplifier OP which reduces the driving current I of
B
transistor T1.
Independent claim 18 is reproduced as follows:
18. A method for controlling saturation of an integrated
circuit bipolar transistor in a semiconductor substrate,
comprising the steps of:
2
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