Icon International Inc.

Icon Systems International, Inc.

Randall J Rorden

Mark Muhlestein

Ronald B Arthur

Darryl J Stewart

Michael E Rex

Dennis A Fairclough

A system for providing a high speed digital communication path between the processor of a host computer and the processors of one or more remote computers. The high speed digital communication path allows a remote computer to efficiently share the resources of the larger host computer such as high speed magnetic disk drives and printers. A host interface located at the host computer is connected to the internal host bus of the host computer. The host interface includes a host port and components which provide for the transfer of data from the host bus to the host port. The data bits presented at the host port are arranged in a parallel format. A communication cable conveys the parallel data bits from the host port to a remote port in a remote interface at a remote computer. The remote interface provides a random access memory and components for transferring data from the remote bus to the random access memory and vice-versa. Data bits presented at the remote port are also conveyed to the random access memory. The host interface and the remote interface include control structures to supervise and arbitrate accesses to the communication cable and to the random access memory.

System and method for sharing resources of a host computer among a

A system and method for allowing dynamic configuration of the translation entries within a memory management system of a computer. In the disclosed embodiment, portions of a logical address from a CPU are defined as offset, page, volume/page, and volume fields. The offset field is presented unaltered to a main memory to select a specific location within a page of memory. The page field forms a first portion of the address of a selected entry in the translation memory. The volume/page field is combined with the contents of a base register as specified by the contents of a mask register to form the remaining portion of the address of a selected entry in the translation memory. The volume field and volume/page fields are compared to one or more tags stored in the translation memory to determine if a match exists. If a match exists, the frame pointer associated with the matching tag is output to main memory as the physical address of the frame containing the desired page.

Dynamic memory management system and method

A digital memory system wherein a plurality of frames in the memory, each frame holding a page of data, may be rapidly accessed utilizing static column dynamic random access memories (SCRAMs). The SCRAM devices are configured such that a page of data is located on corresponding rows of a plurality of SCRAM devices, the corresponding rows being referred to as frames. Once a row has been activated into static column mode, successive accesses to the same row may be made very rapidly. In the presently preferred embodiments, a plurality of banks are provided, each bank being capable of holding one page of data in static column mode. In the preferred embodiments, a tag register and comparator are provided which are associated with each bank. The tag register contains a portion of the address which previously caused an access to its corresponding bank. An address is presented to all the tag registers and comparators. If a match occurs, a memory access to the bank corresponding to the matching tag register may be made while the row in the selected bank is still in static column mode.

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Orem, UT, United States of America

Randall J Rorden