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:
Sep. 23, 1997
Filed:
Mar. 25, 1996
Michael Scott Allen, Austin, TX (US);
Ravi Kumar Arimilli, Round Rock, TX (US);
John Michael Kaiser, Cedar Park, TX (US);
William Kurt Lewchuk, Austin, TX (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
A system and method which utilizes a unique bus protocol in conjunctions plural Dval.sub.-- control signals to minimize the dead time between blocks of data being transferred between components is a data processing system. The present invention introduces another latch-to-latch data valid control signal and alternates the usage of this signal during back to back data transfers from the same or different bus devices. In this manner the restore and tristate dead cycles are totally overlapped with the data transfer and the minimum possible number of dead cycle(s) is achieved between different blocks of data transfers. With the method of the present invention, data providers alternately activate the Dval.sub.-- signals and data receivers look at all Dval.sub.-- signals and if any one of them is active, then the data is considered valid and can be read.