3com Corporation

Jeff Allen Harrell

Tim Urry Price

Shayne Messerly

David Moore

Gerald A Wilson

Garn H Morrell

Harrison Killian

Brady V Brown

A computing environment in which a plurality of portable computers use a spread spectrum communications link to wirelessly communicate with and receive input from a plurality of peripheral devices. In a preferred embodiment, one or more portable or laptop computers each have a PCMCIA card. The PCMCIA card has an RF transreceiver that sends and receives spread spectrum signals, where each spread spectrum signal identifies and makes a demand upon a peripheral device. The spread spectrum signals from the transreceiver on each PCMCIA card are received by a transreceiver on a docking station that is interfaced to one or more peripheral devices. The docking station 'de-spreads' the spectrum signals and then directs the same to the particular interfaced peripheral device identified in the signal. A similar process is followed in transmitting a spread spectrum signal from one of the interfaced devices to a particular laptop computer.

Wireless multiple function PC card

In a system having an DSP, an ASIC and a memory, in which the ASIC generates a number of different competing interrupts for the DSP to service, the ASIC has an interrupt request control module which automatically provides the DSP with a vector pointing to the memory location of the interrupt service routine for the currently pending interrupt request having the highest priority of all pending requests. The DSP reads this vector and uses it to access the interrupt service routine in the memory. Reading of this vector causes the interrupt request to be de-asserted, which causes the next highest priority pending interrupt request to become the highest priority pending interrupt request. As a result, a new vector is presented for the next read by the DSP.

Interrupt request control module with a DSP interrupt vector generator

Growing community of inventors

Salt Lake City, UT, United States of America

Jeff Allen Harrell