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:
Mar. 10, 1998
Filed:
Jun. 27, 1994
Bryan M Richter, Fremont, CA (US);
Stephen A Smith, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Daniel G Bezzant, Pleasanton, CA (US);
Kasturiraman Gopalaswamy, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Suhas Anand Shetty, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Arunachalam Vaidyanathan, Fremont, CA (US);
Cirrus Logic, Inc., Fremont, CA (US);
Abstract
A peripheral interface system and apparatus including a pair of integrated circuits, referred to as a system adapter and a socket controller, use a communication protocol, referred to as a windowed-interchip-communication protocol, to interface peripherals, such as PCMCIA cards or infrared devices, and other subsystems having different formats with a CPU system bus. The system adapter communicates to a hard disk drive subsystem using the ATA communication standards to interface an ATA hard disk drive with the CPU system bus. Communication between the system adapter and the socket controller, which communicates with PCMCIA peripheral cards and IR peripherals, is accomplished using the windowed-interchip-communication protocol which may share hardware resources with other communication protocols. Communication between the system adapter and the hard disk drive and between the system adapter and the socket controller may be provided on the same chain of a standard 40 signal ribbon cable. Alternatively communication between an expansion board and a socket controller may be performed across a cable separate from the hard disk drives having a different signal line format. The system adapter may be included within a single interface expansion board which can be connected to the motherboard and CPU system bus or it can be directly connected or soldered to the motherboard and communicate with the socket controller and ATA hard disk drives using one or more busses.