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.

Date of Patent:
Feb. 22, 2000

Filed:

Dec. 01, 1997
Applicant:
Inventor:

Glen W Brown, Austin, TX (US);

Assignee:

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA (US);

Attorneys:
Primary Examiner:
Assistant Examiner:
Int. Cl.
CPC ...
G06F / ;
U.S. Cl.
CPC ...
712-1 ; 712 27 ; 712 28 ; 712 29 ; 712 32 ; 712 37 ; 712 40 ; 370331 ; 370338 ;
Abstract

A communications system utilizes an embedded Digital Signal Processor (DSP), a DSP interface and memory architecture, a micro-controller interface, a DSP operating system (OS), a data flow model, and an interface for hardware blocks. The design allows software to control much of the configuration of the architecture while using hardware to provide efficient data flow, signal processing, and memory access. In devices with embedded DSPs, memory access is often the bottleneck and is tightly coupled to the efficiency of the design. The platform architecture involves a method that allows the sharing of the DSP memory with other custom hardware blocks or the micro-controller. The DSP can operate at full millions-of-instructions-per-second (MIPS) while another function is transferring data to and from memory. This allows for an efficient use of the memory and for a partitioning of the DSP tasks between software and hardware.


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