A telephone transmission circuit for connection to telephone line terminals includes a transmitter amplifier, a receiver amplifier and a balancing circuit for suppressing the leakage of the output of the transmitter amplifier to the receiver amplifier, the transmitter amplifier being connected to the line terminals so that a power supplied from the line is effectively used. Good impedance matching between the line and the telephone transmission circuit is achieved by the automatic adjustment of the balancing circuit responsive to the line length between the telephone transmission circuit and an exchange.

According to the exemplary embodiments, a voltage or current-controlled oscillator is controlled in frequency by the signal (i.e., voltage or current) from a microphone. The frequency modulated signal is applied to a direct digital discriminator that produces a digital representation of the instantaneous frequency at the desired speech sampling rate. The digital discriminator may be formed, for example, by applying the oscillator signal to a direct phase digitizing circuit along with a reference frequency and calculating a sequence of instantaneous phases of the oscillator relative to the reference frequency. The phase sequence is then applied to a digital phase locked loop (or otherwise numerically differentiated) to generate a sequence of binary words representative of instantaneous frequency and therefore representative of the speech waveform. Since the low-level speech waveform substantially does not enter the integrated circuit except as a high-level frequency-modulated carrier, the technique is immune to noise caused by high speed random logic circuits such as microprocessors and DSPs operating on the chip.