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:
Jul. 17, 2001
Filed:
Jan. 06, 1999
Patrick L. Ferguson, Cypress, TX (US);
Paul B. Rawlins, Spring, TX (US);
David F. Heinrich, Tomball, TX (US);
Robert L. Woods, Allentown, PA (US);
Compaq Computer Corp., Houston, TX (US);
Abstract
An interrupt controller may serially scan a plurality of interrupt request signals and/or receive interrupt request signals on parallel inputs. A scan latency may be associated with updating the status of serially scanned interrupt requests. Spurious interrupts may result from the scan latency. To reduce the chance of spurious interrupts, serially scanned interrupt requests may be masked for an amount of time following an end of interrupt (EOI). Write cycles to clear interrupt requests may be posted in a write buffer. The delay of such write cycles clearing the write buffer may also result in spurious interrupts. To reduce the chance of such spurious interrupts, EOI cycles may be delayed or retried until the write buffer empties.