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:
May. 21, 2002
Filed:
Sep. 27, 1999
Andrea Y. J. Chen, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Lordson L. Yue, Foster City, CA (US);
ATI International SRL, , BB;
Abstract
A bank conflict detector compares at least a portion of a current address signal (i.e. an address signal generated by a request currently issued to main memory) with a corresponding portion of a to-be-issued memory address signal, to determine if a bank conflict exists. Specifically, in one embodiment, the bank conflict detector includes a number of exclusive OR gates that receive as inputs the two addresses to be compared, and generate an output (also called “XOR result”) that is compared with predetermined patterns to determine if a bank conflict exists. For example, if the bank conflict detector finds that the XOR result is 0 (zero) then the two addresses access the same bank. The bank conflict detector also the XOR result with patterns that are formed by a number of consecutive 1 in the least significant bits and a number of consecutive 0 in the most significant bits. If no match, then the bank conflict detector determines that no bank conflict exists. Otherwise, the bank conflict detector compares at least one of the addresses (both addresses in one implementation) with one or more predetermined patterns (e.g. two patterns in one implementation), and in case of a match determines that a bank conflict exists, and otherwise determines that no bank conflict exists. These patterns also have 0 in the least significant positions and 1 in the most significant positions or vice versa, depending on the implementation.