Patent ID: 8625373

Claim:
A sensing circuit comprising: a first sense amplifier circuit comprising: a cross-coupled pair of PMOS transistors cross-coupling a first node and a second node to a PMOS common-source node; a cross-coupled pair of NMOS transistors cross-coupling the first node and the second node to an NMOS common-source node; a precharge circuit configured to precharge the first and second nodes to a first voltage; a PMOS tail transistor responsive to an active-low sense enable signal and coupling the PMOS common-source node to a second voltage higher in magnitude than said first voltage; an NMOS tail transistor responsive to an active-high sense enable signal and coupling the NMOS common-source node to a third voltage lower in magnitude than said first voltage; and a first driver circuit responsive to one of the first and second nodes and responsive to a driver enable signal, being configured to generate a read data signal on an output node when enabled by the driver enable signal, and configured to decouple the output node from one of the second voltage and the third voltage when not enabled by the driver enable signal to thereby prevent crowbar current flow irrespective of the voltage on said one of the first and second nodes.