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:
Oct. 21, 2003
Filed:
Jan. 27, 1999
Michael Vengchong Lau, Cupertino, CA (US);
Shashank C. Merchant, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Abstract
A novel method of flow control in a multiport data switching system having a decision making engine for controlling data forwarding between receive ports and at least one transmit port. Data blocks representing received data packets are placed in a plurality of data queues to be processed by the decision making engine. The data queues allocated to the receive ports are monitored to produce a flow control threshold signal for a selected data queue to indicate a heavy traffic condition of a receive port corresponding to the selected data queue. For example, the flow control threshold signal may indicate that the receive port is close to an overflow condition. Monitoring of a selected data queue may be performed by comparing a write pointer indicating a memory location for writing the data blocks into the selected data queue with a read pointer indicating a memory location for reading the data blocks from the selected data queue. The flow control threshold signal is produced when a predetermined number of memory entries in the data queue is occupied.