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:
Dec. 27, 2005
Filed:
Sep. 30, 1999
Brian Donovan, Wilsonville, OR (US);
Brian Donovan, Wilsonville, OR (US);
Xyron Corporation, Vancouver, WA (US);
Abstract
The invention constitutes a unique hardware zero overhead interrupt and task change mechanism for the reduction or elimination of interrupt latency and task change processing overhead delays in computer architectures. Without loss of time, the system performs complete task state saving and restoration between one cycle and the next without software intervention. For each Central Processing Unit () register, the invention uses one or more auxiliary latches () wherein one latch () is used as the 'running' latch and one of the auxiliary latches is attached to task storage memory. The invention swaps connections between alternate 'running' registers and auxiliary registers while transferring other tasks to and from task storage memory (). The invention provides a task linking system to allow the linking of tasks for the mandatory sequential execution of the linked tasks. Further, the invention includes a priority “impatience” counter system to increase the relative priorities of various tasks as they approach their task deadlines.