Ford Motor Company Limited

Visteon Global Technolgoies, Inc.

Stephen W Hoffman

Alexander Y Gopp

John Michael Dicky

Sachin Shah

Christopher Eugene Andrews

Saad A Jamoua

Brian Reece Howell

Thomas Norfork, Jr

A removable vehicle entertainment system is provided. The system includes a video display screen for displaying entertainment to an occupant of the vehicle. The system can be removed from the docking bracket in the vehicle, and attached to an external docking station such that the system can be used independently of the power supply and speakers of the vehicle. Further, the system can be used as a self-contained personal entertainment system. The system includes mechanical and/or electrical componentry that determines the orientation of the video display screen, and allows the electronics of the system to display an image on the screen in an appropriate orientation, thus avoiding upside-down images in the various uses of the system.

Removable vehicle entertainment system

An ignition control system for controlling ignition knock while maintaining minimum spark for best torque (MBT). Both knock control and MBT control are simultaneously utilized. During knock control, engine cycles are counted between successive knock detections. When the count is less than a first value, a retard signal is generated. An advance signal is generted when the count is greater than a second predetermined value. These retard and advance signals are accumulated as knock trim signals in RAM storage locations as a function of engine speed and load operating points for each cylinder. During MBT control, MBT trim signals are generated by determining convergence of an average difference in indicated mean effective pressure for each cylinder. These MBT trim signals are stored in another RAM as a function of speed and load operating points. Base ignition timing is then corrected by both the knock trim signal and corresponding MBT trim signal at each speed and load operating point.

System and method for combined knock and torque timing control

A dual port, random access, read/write memory is provided such that each microprocessor can access shared memory locations without regard to the state of the other microprocessor. Previously known dual port systems use delays, called wait states, or handshaking techniques to control memory acces and to resolve overlapping memory access requests. This invention avoids the need for special timing controls by improving memory response time. Once a valid address is placed on the address bus by the microprocessor, which is recognized by the memory as being within its range of assigned address values, the memory prefetches the data at that address may soon follow. If it does, then the data is placed on the data bus. If it does not, then the prefeteched data is ignored and a write operation takes place for the particular address.

Read/write random access memory with data prefetch

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Riverview, MI, United States of America

Stephen W Hoffman