Marvell Asia Pte., Ltd.

Broadcom Corporation

Nithyananda Miyar

Ramacharan Sundararaman

Avinash Sodani

Martin Kovac

Saurabh Shrivastava

Vamsi M Tatapudi

Raghuveer Shivaraj

Hakseon Lee

A new approach is proposed to support a hardware-based lock mechanism having a hardware-based lock unit associated with a resource, wherein the lock is utilized by an arbitrator to arbitrate between multiple agents requesting access to the resource. When a first agent requests access to resource in unlocked state, the arbitrator creates a lock ID and set a locked state indicating that the resource is locked. The lock ID is provided to the first agent, which now has exclusive control over the resource. The arbitrator ensures that any agent with the same ID may access the resource. When a second agent requests access to the resource with a lock ID to the arbitrator, it is granted access to the resource if the lock ID provided matches the one stored on the lock unit. If there is a mismatch between the lock IDs, access to the resource is denied.

System and methods for firmware security mechanism

A new approach is proposed that contemplates systems and methods to support post reset fuse reload for latency reduction. First, values of fuses are read once and stored into one or more load registers on an electronic device, wherein the load registers are protected. Once the values of the fuse are loaded into the load registers, a valid indicator of the load registers is set indicating that the values have been successfully loaded into the load registers. When other components of the electronic device need to access these values, the other components will check the load registers first. If it is determined that the valid indicator of the load registers is set, the stored values are read from the load registers instead of from the fuses. If the valid indicator of the load registers is not set, the values are loaded again from the fuses into the load registers.

System and methods for latency reduction for fuse reload post reset

A new approach is proposed to support hardware-based PCIe link up based on post silicon characterization of an electronic device. A non-volatile storage medium of a bootup unit on the electronic device maintains an initialization sequence for the physical layer of a PCIe link, and a non-volatile storage medium allows flexible programming. During operation, the bootup unit reads from the non-volatile storage medium instructions to program/override one or more PCIe physical layer settings and controller registers for the PCIe link based on the post silicon characterization of the electronic device. The bootup unit is limited to access and override only to the one or more physical layer settings and controller registers of the PCIe link. The entire process of reading the initialization sequence and programming the one or more PCIe physical layer settings and the controller registers happens within time limit constraints of the PCIe specification for latency reduction.

System and methods for hardware-based PCIe link up based on post silicon characterization

A new approach is proposed to support hardware-based protection for registers of an electronic device. Sources requesting access to the registers are categorized into a set of internal sources that can be trusted and a set of external sources that are untrusted. The registers are classified into a set of internal registers allowed to be accessed by the internal resources only, a set of read-only external registers that can be read by the external resources in addition to accessed by the internal resources, and a set of read/write external registers that can be read and written by both the internal and the external resources. Each access request by a source to the registers includes the source type, wherein access request is granted or denied based on the matching between the source bits in the access request and the register classification bits of the one or more registers to be accessed.

System and method for hardware-based register protection mechanism

A new approach is proposed to support hardware-based memory region protection for an electronic device. One or more sources/requesting access to a memory/storage that is local to or associated with the electronic device are categorized into at least two types&#x2014;a set of trusted sources and a set of untrusted sources. Accordingly, a memory manager is configured to partition the memory into a plurality of regions including at least a secure region that is accessible only by a trusted source and a non-secure region that is accessible by an untrusted source. Any access attempt to the secure region by one of the untrusted sources will be blocked. During operation, the memory manager is configured to dynamically adjust the demarcation and/or size of the secure region and the non-secure region of the memory via remapping of the memory based on current access need to data maintained in the memory.

System and method for memory region protection

A switching chip for performing switching and other functions on packets transmitted through the switching chip. The switching chip includes a memory management unit that identifies a class of service to which each packet belongs, wherein upon processing the packet. The memory management unit transmits the packet to a CPU through a CPU processing module. The switching chip also includes a CPU processing module that includes a class of service bitmap that is associated with a plurality of channels. Each of the plurality of channels is further associated with at least one class of service, includes a per channel bit and is assigned a predefined priority level. Upon receiving packets from the memory management unit, the CPU processing module is configured to sort the packets according to the class of service to which the packet belongs and store each packet in an associated one of the plurality of channels. The CPU processing module is also configured to use the per channel bit to determine how to process packets in each for the plurality of channels for which there is no available CPU buffer. When there is no available CPU buffer for one of the plurality of channels, the CPU processing module is configured to set an appropriate bit in the class of service bitmap and transmits the class of service bitmap to the memory management unit.

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Nithyananda Miyar