National Semiconductor Corporation

James Andrew Colgan

Robert James Divivier

Michael John Shay

William V Miller

Daniel Ross Herrington

Kent Bruce Waterson

Franco Iacobelli

Alexander Perez

Jianhua Helen Pang

David Scott Weinman

Ralph Warren Haines

William E Ballachino

Stephen C Pries

Dan Craig O'Neill

John R Gunther

Brian J Marley

An integrated circuit (IC) includes multiple circuits and functions which share multiple internal signal buses, three physical and five logical, according to distributed bus access and control arbitration. The multiple internal signal buses are shared among three tiers of internal circuit functions: a central processing unit and a DMA controller; a DRAM controller and a bus interface unit; and peripheral interface circuits, such as PCMCIA and display controllers. Two of the physical buses correspond to two of the logical buses and are used for communications within the IC. The third physical bus corresponds to three of the logical buses and is used for communications between the IC and circuits external to the IC. Arbitration for accessing and controlling the various signal buses is distributed both within and among the three tiers of internal circuit functions. Maximum performance is thereby achieved from the circuit functions accessed most frequently, while still achieving high performance from those circuit functions accessed less frequently. The IC may provided with a processor core with features that support In-Circuit Emulation (ICE).

Integrated circuit with multiple functions sharing multiple internal

A bidirectional parallel signal interface for providing a parallel data interface between a computer and an external peripheral device includes an interface circuit with command registers for communicating commands and data, a first-in, first-out (FIFO) memory for communicating data between the computer and the peripheral device, and host and slave state machines for receiving commands from the command registers and in accordance therewith controlling communication of data between the FIFO and peripheral device and communicating control signals to and from the peripheral device. The communication of data between the FIFO and peripheral device is effected in accordance with data communication rates which are controlled by the host and slave state machines in accordance with the commands from the command registers. The communications of control signals by the host and slave state machines are responsive to their control signals with such responsiveness being controllable in accordance with the commands from the command registers. The communication of data from the FIFO to the peripheral device is halted by the host state machine in accordance with its commands from the command registers. The command registers include a status register for storing data from the peripheral device representing a number of status states of the peripheral device.

Bidirectional parallel data port having multiple data transfer rates,

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Ichikawa, Japan

James Andrew Colgan