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:
Dec. 08, 1998
Filed:
Aug. 06, 1996
Lawrence W Lomelino, Folsom, CA (US);
Thomas W Grieff, Spring, TX (US);
Michael L Sabotta, Cypress, TX (US);
Compaq Computer Corporation, Houston, TX (US);
Abstract
The present invention relates to a secondary channel for a point-to-point burst style bus associated with a computer system. The point-to-point bus may originate as a standardized bus from a fibre channel controller. The point-to-point bus connects to another circuit which may be a bridge circuit, a minicomputer or a peripheral device. A secondary channel is also connected to the point-to-point bus and is adapted to share the bus by receiving information having predetermined addresses. The information recieved by the secondary channel can be stored in a memory that is shared with a processor. Command/control information can be extracted from the point-to-point bus before data is transferred through the bridge circuit in order to allow the data to be acted on more quickly by processing/storage devices since the control data was already made available to the storage devices via the secondary channel.