Overvoltage protection for battery powered equipment

Abstract

An overvoltage protection circuit for a CMOS electronic multimeter circuit uses a pair of complementary field-effect protection transistors connected to each input line of the meter circuit. The gate electrodes of the protection transistors are connected to bias voltage sources which provide bias voltages with magnitudes slightly less than the meter power supply voltages. The protection transistors go into conduction when an overvoltage condition causes the voltage on the input to exceed the bias voltages and the conducting protection transistors clamp the input voltage to substantially the bias voltage. Current caused by an overvoltage condition is shunted to ground thereby avoiding a charging condition in the power supplies.