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. 15, 2000
Filed:
Oct. 01, 1997
Norman W Petty, Boulder, CO (US);
Lucent Technologies Inc., Murray Hill, NJ (US);
Abstract
A content-addressable memory (CAM) is implemented by using otherwise-unused memory management unit (MMU 102) and cache memories (104, 105) of a program-controlled microprocessor (100). A program stored in an instruction cache (104) and executed by the microprocessor causes the microprocessor to respond to receipt of a word of data (200), which is illustratively the VPI/VCI of an ATM network connection, by applying the most-significant bits (MSBs 202) of the received word as a comparand to tags (203) of entries (206) of a fully-associative translation buffer (103) of the MMU to obtain an index (204) indicative of which translation buffer entry's corresponding tag matches the comparand. The program further causes the microprocessor to respond to obtaining of the index by concatenating the index with the least-significant bits (LSBs 201) of the received word to form a memory address of a data cache (105) which stores a plurality of records (210) and apply the address to the data cache to retrieve the addressed record, which is illustratively the path of the connection through the ATM network. Entries may be added to and deleted from the translation buffer during processing as needed.