ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 26 -- United States Patent no. 12,401,204, issued on Aug. 26, was assigned to Caterpillar Inc. (Peoria, Ill.).

"Circuit to drive electrically controlled switches within electrified machine" was invented by Matthew Lee Boggs (Metamora, Ill.) and Jason Lee Miller (Princeville, Ill.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A driving circuit to control/drive a contactor using a high-side driver integrated into the battery pack controller. The driver circuit may electrically isolate the controller pins of the battery pack controller (which interface the contactors) from the low-voltage digital processing core of the battery pack controller. The driver circuit may provide techniques to ...