A diode-OR circuit is used in electronics to isolate two or more voltage sources. There are two typical implementations:
When a DC supply voltage needs to be generated from one of a number of different sources, for example when terminating a
parallel SCSI
Parallel SCSI (formally, SCSI Parallel Interface, or SPI) is the earliest of the interface implementations in the SCSI family. SPI is a parallel bus; there is one set of electrical connections stretching from one end of the SCSI bus to the oth ...
bus, a very simple circuit like this can be used:
In
digital electronics
Digital electronics is a field of electronics involving the study of digital signals and the engineering of devices that use or produce them. This is in contrast to analog electronics and analog signals.
Digital electronic circuits are usual ...
a diode-OR circuit is used to derive a simple Boolean logic function. This kind of circuit was once very common in
diode–transistor logic
Diode–transistor logic (DTL) is a class of digital circuits that is the direct ancestor of transistor–transistor logic. It is called so because the logic gating function (e.g., AND) is performed by a diode network and the amplifying functio ...
but has been largely replaced by
CMOS in modern electronics:
Logic gates
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