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:
Jun. 09, 1998
Filed:
Sep. 20, 1996
Joseph Y Chang, Cedar Park, TX (US);
Hidayat Lioe, Cedar Park, TX (US);
Paul A Reed, Austin, TX (US);
Brian J Snider, Austin, TX (US);
Motorola, Inc., Schaumburg, IL (US);
Abstract
A data processor (10) has a cache array (40) and a control unit (58) for storing a number of recently accessed data lines. If an execution unit requests a data line that is not stored in the memory cache (a miss) then the control unit will request the data from an external memory device and allocate a location in the cache array in which it will store the requested data when returned. In the depicted embodiment, the control unit first attempts to allocate an invalid one of N possible locations, where N is the set way associativity of the memory cache. If none of the ways is invalid, then the control unit uses a least recently used (LRU) algorithm to select the location. Therefore, the data cache may be non-blocking up to N times to the same set.