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:
Feb. 23, 1999
Filed:
Aug. 14, 1997
Kenneth C Ma, Cupertino, CA (US);
Pranay D Shah, San Jose, CA (US);
National Semiconductor Corporation, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Abstract
Hot-insertion/removal, herein used interchangeably with hot-docking/undocking, would enable the connection or disconnection of a fully powered bus to an expansion device with no damage or data loss to either device. Previous docking solutions typically require the docking bus to be placed into a power-off or power-managed state, which means the user would have to consciously place the system into a power-off or power-managed state before an insertion or removal could occur. The hot-docking/undocking invention is completely transparent to the end user, so it would provide tremendous flexibility and seamless insertions and removals. Hot-docking/undocking is composed of three elements: a detection of a docking/undocking situation; a placement of the docking bus into a static state; and a system reconfiguration. The present invention places the docking bus into an static state through the use of a special handshaking protocol and clock and reset signals on the expansion device. The entire mechanism can be applied in both the insertion and removal of a power-on bus to and from an expansion device.