Standard Microsystems Corporation

Paul Brant

Neil A Winchester

William R Chiechi

Charles A Forni

Anthony Tarascio

John E Stone, Iii

An audio-visual content delivery system includes an interface to communicate with a local area network (LAN). A packet processing circuit in the system may filter and route Ethernet packet data received from the LAN, to specific ports and/or queues without host processor intervention. The packet processing circuit may utilize a set of filter and routing mechanisms configurable in hardware to interpret various Internet Engineering Task Force networking transport protocols, and may transfer the packet data in a format recognized by a variety of consumer subsystems, each of which may be coupled to the packet processing circuit. The packet processing circuit may be implemented as a semiconductor device, and may allow encapsulated application data to be routed to a plurality of different types of application sinks or processors, forming a point-to-point or multi-point serial or parallel data stream over a standard transport covering numerous levels of the ISO data communications stack.

High speed ethernet MAC and PHY apparatus with a filter based ethernet packet router with priority queuing and single or multiple transport stream interfaces

In one embodiment, an audio-visual content delivery system, such as a set-top box/personal video recorder system, is configured to interface with a local area network (LAN). A packet processing circuit comprised in the system may be configured to filter and route Ethernet packet data received from the LAN to specific ports and/or queues without host processor intervention. The packet processing circuit may utilize a set of filter and routing mechanisms configurable in hardware to interpret various Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) networking transport protocols, and may transfer the packet data in a format recognized by a variety of consumer subsystems, each of which may be coupled to the decoder. The packet processing circuit may be implemented as a semiconductor device, and may allow encapsulated application data, (encapsulated using standardized encapsulation techniques), to be routed to a plurality of different types of application sinks or processors, forming a point-to-point or multi-point serial or parallel data stream over a standard transport covering numerous levels of the ISO data communications stack.

A memory alignment system for efficient data transfer between a local memory that is configured in a host system, and a remote memory, comprises a data communications controller configured in the host system to align transmitted and received data based on formatting information received from the host system. When transmitting data from local system memory, for example over an Ethernet connection, communications control driver software may first write formatting information corresponding to the data into the data communications controller. The data communications controller is operable to align the data based on the formatting information as the driver software moves the data into a configurable transmit data buffer inside the data communications controller. Similarly, the driver software may write formatting information for receive data into a receive-format configuration buffer. The data communications controller may align the receive data based on the receive-formatting information as the receive data is being read by the host system. Because the data communications controller performs all the required data alignment, no data alignment by the host processor is required.

Hardware supported peripheral component memory alignment method

A peripheral device may include an interface configured to interface to a memory bus and a functional unit coupled to the interface and configured to perform a peripheral device function on data accessed by the interface. The interface may be configured to perform a data access in response to memory control, address, and data signals on the memory bus. The functional unit may be configured to perform various peripheral device functions such as data communication functions, video functions, printing functions, mass storage functions, and human interface controller functions.

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Pelham, NY, United States of America

Paul Brant