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:
Mar. 28, 2000
Filed:
May. 30, 1997
Daniel W Green, Plano, TX (US);
National Semiconductor Corporation, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Abstract
A cache has programmable, finely ganular, locked-down regions within a way or way(s) so that the contents of the locked-down regions are not evicted. The finely granular locked-down regions need not be contiguous and are programmed as either 'locked-valid' or 'locked-invalid' to provide general purpose memory that is local and private to the processor or for masking defected cache lines or portions thereof. Finely granular, programmable spatial regions of the cache that are locked-down are preferably, although not exclusively, programmed through two additional states to the standard MESI (Modified, Exclusive, Shared, Invalid) protocol for multipurpose cache coherency.