Hewlett-packard Development Company, L.P.

Hewlett-packard Company

Brian William Hughes

Warren Kurt Howlett

J Michael Hill

A method for controlling data flow to a pair of storage devices includes receiving at least one new entry to store in a first storage device or a second storage device in the pair of storage devices and determining a number of entries made to the first and second storage devices out of the at least one new entry. The method also includes calculating a difference between available space in the first storage device and the second storage device, and calculating a number of credits used by the at least one new entry based on the numbers of entries to the first and second storage devices and on the difference in available space.

Credit-based storage device flow control

Calculating unneeded data storage credits for a data transmission to a pair of storage devices

A method for allocating data write credits for a storage device includes gathering requests for the data write credits from a plurality of data sources and assembling the plurality of data sources in a prioritized list. The method also includes removing lowest priority data sources one by one from the prioritized list until a total of the requests made by all data sources remaining in the prioritized list are within a number of available data write credits, and granting the requests for all the data sources remaining in the prioritized list.

Storage device flow control

A method for calculating flow control credits includes determining a number of entries added to each of a pair of storage devices, determining a number of entries removed from each of the storage devices, calculating a difference between available space in the storage devices, and calculating a number of credits to release based on the numbers of entries added to each of the storage devices, on the numbers of entries removed from each of the storage devices, and on the difference in available space. Entries removed from one storage device are treated as an entry added to the other storage device.

The present invention is directed to a system and method which manages one or more errors in a plurality of elements. The invention tests an element of the plurality of elements and detects the error in one of the elements. The invention then repairs a group of N elements, wherein N is greater than one and the group of N elements includes the element with the error. The invention inhibits subsequent repairs of the group of N elements.

Device to inhibit duplicate cache repairs

The present invention incorporates built-in self test and self repair functionality into a semiconductor memory device in which reconfiguration data used to replace faulty memory is stored at the same time testing to identify other faulty memory cells continues. To avoid access contention conflicts to a content addressable memory used to identify rows or groups of rows having faulty memory cells, the built in test function writes test data to each cell at least twice before reading the stored data. By writing twice before reading, contention problems caused by simultaneous updating of the content addressable memory are avoided. That is, even if the content addressable memory is initially unavailable to process address information used to access a memory cell to be tested, repetition of the write process ensure that the data will be properly stored when the memory again becomes available after being updated.

Cache test sequence for single-ported row repair CAM

The present invention includes a system and a methodology for eliminating faulty memory cells in a memory array with replacement columns of memory cells and replacement rows of memory cells. The individual memory cells are checked to ensure that each is operational. Non-operational cells are replaced by first replacing columns which contain a threshold number of non-operational cells with spare columns and second removing any remaining non-operational cells by replacing the rows containing those non-operational cells with spare rows.

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Fort Collins, CO, United States of America

Brian William Hughes