Hi Michael,

Thanks for your tip. Tried and it works fine now. And to answer the other queries raised :
- The I/O port pins are 5V tolerant.
- And why did I try inputting into a Push-Pull ? There is this note on the Silabs F020 data sheet :
"Note that the state of a Port I/O pin can always be read from its associated Data register regardless of whether that pin has been assigned to a digital peripheral or behaves as GPIO."

I got mislead by the above.

And finally the code that worked :

void ready(void)
{
	P0 = 0xff ;          // Set port as input
	P0MDOUT   = 0x7F;    // Switch P0.7 alone to Open Drain
	LCD_RS   = 0;
	LCD_R_W  = 1;

	while (LCD_BUSY)
 	{
  	  LCD_ENB = 0;
	  LCD_ENB = 1;
        }
        P0MDOUT   = 0xFF;    // Revert back to P0 as Push Pull
 }

Raghu