Microchip Technology Inc.

Michael Palladino

Bendik Kleveland

Carl Gyllenhammer

The embodiments that are described herein provide random access to individual data storage locations of a group of buffers, which may be scattered in the memory. These embodiments provide a virtual memory interface that applies virtual addresses in a flat memory linear addressing space as indices into the physical memory addresses that are ordered into a sequence in accordance with the group of buffers. In this way, these embodiments enable a device (e.g., a processor) to directly and sequentially access all of the scattered physical memory locations of a fragmented data item, such as a packet, without having to perform any memory segmentation or paging processes. In some embodiments, these accesses include both read and write accesses to the scattered data storage locations.

Virtual memory interface

A block of contiguous data storage locations of a memory is divided into pools of memory chunks. The memory chunks in same ones of the pools have equal chunk sizes. The memory chunks in different ones of the pools have different chunk sizes. In each of the pools, the memory chunks are addressable by respective chunk base physical addresses in a respective linear contiguous sequence that starts from a respective pool base physical address. The physical addresses of the memory chunks are translated into corresponding internal handles and vice versa, where each of the internal handles is smaller in size than its corresponding physical address. For each of the pools, an associated pool queue comprising respective ones of the internal handles to allocatable ones of the memory chunks in the pool is maintained.

Growing community of inventors

San Carlos, CA, United States of America

Michael Palladino