ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,287,356, issued on April 29, was assigned to SOCIONEXT INC. (Yokohama, Japan).

"Voltage hold circuit, voltage monitoring circuit, and semiconductor integrated circuit" was invented by Kengo Komiya (Yokohama, Japan), Akimitsu Tajima (Yokohama, Japan) and Takeshi Kimura (Yokohama, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The voltage hold circuit is a voltage hold circuit configured to operate every processing cycle, the processing cycle including a hold period and a reset period following the hold period, and hold a voltage value for an input voltage signal, the voltage hold circuit including: a first hold circuit configured to operate to hold ...