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:
Jan. 11, 2005
Filed:
May. 29, 2001
Joseph J. Ervin, Stow, MA (US);
Joseph J. Ervin, Stow, MA (US);
Sun Microsystems, Inc., Santa Clara, CA (US);
Abstract
One or more bus bridges are used to partition a large IC bus into smaller bus segments. By programming address bitmaps that are internal to each bridge, the various bus segments can be made to appear as one logical bus. In addition, the bus topology can be designed to maximize the ability to isolate faults within a given segment, thereby improving the ability of technicians to diagnose problems in very large IC implementations. In one embodiment, the invention is a unidirectional bus bridge which is designed so that two such bridges can be used in parallel (facing in opposite directions) to implement a fully bi-directional bus bridge. In another embodiment, IC slave addresses are replicated in a single logical IC bus by addressing a tunnel command to a bridge, which command contains an address and causes the bridge to which it is addressed to forward the contained address.