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. 07, 1999
Filed:
Sep. 05, 1997
Drew Eric Wingard, San Carlos, CA (US);
Geert Paul Rosseel, Menlo Park, CA (US);
Sonics, Inc., Los Altos, CA (US);
Abstract
The present invention provides for an on-chip communications method with fully distributed control combining a fully-pipelined, fixed-latency, synchronous bus with a two-level arbitration scheme where the first level of arbitration is a framed, time-division-multiplexing arbitration scheme and the second level is a fairly-allocated round-robin scheme implemented using a token-passing mechanism. Both the latency and the bandwidth allocation are software programmable in real-time operation of the system. The present invention also provides for a communications system where access to a shared resource is controlled by the above communications protocol. Access to and from the shared resource from the subsystem is through a bus interface module. The bus interface modules provide a level of indirection between the subsystem to be connected and the shared resource. This allows the decoupling of system performance requirements from subsystem requirements. Communication over the bus is fully memory mapped.