The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Dec. 14, 1976
Filed:
Mar. 07, 1975
Tien Chi Chen, San Jose, CA (US);
Chin Tung, Saratoga, CA (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
An apparatus for performing efficient transposition exchange sorts among equal length records is described. The apparatus takes advantage of the flow steering property of linkable circulating storage loops to minimize the average access time by positioning information closer to the output port in a storage structure. The apparatus is formed from a linear array of equal size shift register loops each holding one record. The loops are switchably interconnected such that when two boundary switches are set in a first mode, the contents of each loop normally circulate wholly therewithin. Upon a common boundary switch being set in a second mode, the contents within a first loop flow into a second loop and vis-a-vis. By setting a common boundary switch to the second mode, the contents of a pair of adjacent loops are exchanged in the duration of one loop cycle time. Further exchanges can be started before a previous one is complete; this overlapping of operations can lead to an effective exchange rate of two exchanges per loop cycle. By repeating the exchange for consecutive pairs of loops, then the contents of any reference loop can be migrated to an output port D loops away in (D + 1)/2 loop cycle times.