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:
Apr. 22, 1997
Filed:
Nov. 30, 1994
Patrick M Bland, Austin, TX (US);
Daniel R Cronin, III, Lake Worth, FL (US);
Richard G Hofmann, Cary, NC (US);
Dennis Moeller, Boca Raton, FL (US);
Lance M Venarchick, Boca Raton, FL (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
A system having an industry standard architecture (ISA) bus with a 24-bit memory addressing capacity and a peripheral controller interconnect (PCI) bus with a 32-bit memory addressing capacity, is provided with a bridge coupled between the ISA and PCI buses. The bridge has a direct memory access (DMA) controller circuit that generates 32-bit memory addresses for DMA transfer operations over the PCI bus. The DMA controller circuit includes a pair of cascaded DMA controllers that generate the 16 least significant bits of the 32-bit memory addresses, and address extension logic having a low page register that provides the 8 next most significant bits of the 32-bit memory addresses, and a high page register that provides the 8 most significant bits of the 32-bit memory addresses. The 16 bits provided by the low and high page registers are concatenated with the lower 16 bits to form the 32-bit addresses. The DMA controller circuit is also provided with count extension logic that increases the transfer count from a 16-bit number to a 24-bit number, so that larger segments of memory may be moved in the individual DMA transfers.