The invention refers to a charge/discharge protection circuit for a rechargeable battery, where the protection circuit is integrated on a single chip, including the fusible link, the load current switch and the short-circuit switch. This is achieved by dividing the functions of the fusible link, the load current switch, and the short-circuit switch into in parallel arranged T-sections, each of which is designed for only a fraction of the nominal load so that each of the easily integrated fuse segments carry only the respective fraction of the nominal current. It is important that the entire protection circuit or its control logic will not be destroyed before through an unduly high over-voltage, in which case the sequential melting of the fuse segments would no longer be guaranteed. This is handled by a semiconductor switch which short-circuits the over-voltage immediately.