SEMICONDUCTOR SWITCHING CIRCUIT FOR AN ELECTRONIC DEVICE

摘要

PURPOSE: Disclosed is a semiconductor switching circuit for an electronic device with at least one micro-controller. CONSTITUTION: The switching circuit comprises at least one voltage regulator (20) for delivering at least one second supply voltage (VCC) derived from at least one first supply voltage (VBATT) for the at least one micro-controller and for switching circuits which cooperate with it or them. The switching circuit as a monolith also incorporates a transceiver function (100, 100') with emitting and receiving means (130, 133; 120', 120'') for coupling the micro-controller (21) to the two-wire bus (BUS-H/BUS-L). This monolith can in addition incorporate watchdog functions, various wake-up functions and an interface via which a serial data exchange with the at least one micro-controller can take place. It can also have means for net-wide identification of bus subscribers showing reference voltage errors and for quantifying such errors. Various embodiments of these means in conjunction with various embodiments of the receiver part of the transceiver permit a bus network e.g. of the CAN type supported by the switching circuit to determine latently, even before the first occurrence of a level error-related outage, the error interval as the most significant measure of bus quality.