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. 08, 1998
Filed:
Mar. 28, 1997
David S Rosenthal, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Curtis Priem, Fremont, CA (US);
Nvidia Corporation, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Abstract
A digital system which uses an arrangement of one or more parallel FIFO buffers in which each FIFO buffer handles data from only one application program at any time. In order to assure that no data written to a FIFO buffer by an application program will overflow the FIFO buffer, each FIFO buffer includes a flow control register which must be read by the processing unit running the application before writing data to an input/output device. The register stores a value which indicates the amount of space available in the FIFO buffer to which data may be written. Reading this register tells the application program how much data may be written without running the risk of overflowing the data storage area which the input/output device has available.