US Patent 11500803 Programmable slave circuit on a communication bus

A programmable slave circuit on a communication bus is provided. In a non-limiting example, the communication bus can be a radio frequency front-end (RFFE) bus operating based on a master-slave topology and the programmable slave circuit can be an RFFE slave circuit on the RFFE bus. The programmable slave circuit is configured to receive a high-level command(s) (e.g., a macro word) over the communication bus. A processing circuit in the programmable slave circuit is programmed to generate a low-level command(s) (e.g., a bitmap word) for controlling a coupled circuit(s) based on the high-level command(s). In this regard, it is possible to program or reprogram the processing circuit, for example via over-the-air (OTA) updates, based on the high-level command(s) to be supported, thus making it possible to flexibly customize the programmable slave circuit according to operating requirements and configurations.