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:
Apr. 27, 2004
Filed:
Nov. 20, 2000
Ryan Fukuhara, Torrance, CA (US);
Leonard Day, Pasadena, CA (US);
Huy H. Luong, San Marino, CA (US);
Robert Rasmussen, Monrovia, CA (US);
Savio N. Chau, Hacienda Heights, CA (US);
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA (US);
Abstract
In an embodiment, a bus controller for connecting a device to an Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C) bus includes fault tolerance features. The I2C bus controller may support fail silent, cyclic redundancy check (CRC), and byte count check operations. The I2C bus controller may include a control unit connected to an I2C core module having a base address. The I2C bus controller may also include a second I2C core module having a base address plus one (BP ). The I2C bus controller may also include a mute timer that countdowns a mute timeout period. This mute timer may be reset upon receiving a fail silent test message sent by a master on the I2C bus in slave mode, or, in the master mode, from itself through the BP I2C core module. If the mute timeout period expires, the control unit may disable the I2C bus controller from transmitting on the I2C bus. The control unit may format CRC values and byte count values into messages, and include a byte counter to compare actual bytes received to the expected byte count indicated by a received byte count value.