Intel Corporation

Thomas R Lane

James P Kardach

Sung Soo Cho

Nicholas B Peterson

Neil W Songer

Jayesh M Joshi

A serial interrupt bus protocol is implemented in which any number of peripherals in a computer system may signal any predetermined interrupt signals to the system's interrupt controller without requiring a dedicated pin for each possible interrupt. Each peripheral implemented on the serial interrupt bus incorporates state machine logic for cycling through possible interrupt states. The peripherals are daisy chained beginning and ending with a serial interrupt controller which follows the same state machine logic as the system peripherals. When the serial interrupt controller receives an active interrupt signal, it determines which interrupt signal to provide to the system's interrupt controller based on the interrupt state of the interrupt controller state machine logic. Peripherals on a secondary serial interrupt bus may be daisy chained with peripherals on a primary system interrupt bus through a system interrupt bridge which also includes state machine logic for following the same state diagram as the system peripherals.

Serial interrupt bus protocol

A computer system has both positive decode agents and subtractive decode agents that are targets of bus transactions, as well as an agent that does not perform a positive decode of a bus transaction, yet does claim bus transactions on behalf of agents to whom a bus transaction is directed.

Method and apparatus for claiming bus access from a first bus to a

A computer architecture which provides for the dynamic configuration of peripheral interrupts. A global router is implemented for mapping interrupts received over a multiple-line shared interrupt bus to correspond to system standard IRQ interrupt signals for a programable interrupt controller (PIC). The global router may configure interrupts to be both level sensitive and edge-triggered interrupts as well as being sharable among multiple devices. The global router further provides its interrupts to a shared interrupt bus which may receive other system interrupts for propagation to the computer system's PIC. The global router provides a centrally located motherboard resource that provides a totally flexible interrupt configuration scheme.

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Thomas R Lane