AbstractThe research and development of a 4‐valued integrated circuit, which is compatible to a binary circuit, is now being conducted intensively, aiming at the transfer of the merits of a multivalued system to a digital system. Another merit of the multivalued circuit is that the number of wirings and the wiring length can be reduced, which is useful in reducing the delay of driving due to the interwiring capacitance. On the other hand, the noise margin is a problem in the use of the multivalued circuit. From such a viewpoint, the authors are trying to improve the noise margin, and reported on the threshold control for the multivalued multithreshold circuit. In this circuit, however, the voltage step is reduced in correspondence to the control of the noise margin. This necessitates an increase of the supply voltage. As a result, when the binary ECL device is used as the circuit element, the number of levels that can be discriminated in the integrated circuit is restricted to 3 (two thresholds). This paper aims at the realization of up to a 5‐valued 12‐threshold control circuit by the binary device. For this purpose, a new threshold detector, the fundamental circuit which is obtained as an extension of that circuit, and the complementary circuit, are employed. In the threshold‐setting circuit in the threshold detector, the control value and the voltage step can be set independently, which leads to the low‐voltage supply. By introducing the signal distributor into the threshold detector, the maximum fan‐in and fan‐out, as well as the maximum number of thresholds are improved drastically. As an application, the threshold control 4‐valued decoder was constructed experimentally, and it is shown that the noise margin is improved by 1.9