Apple patent is for method, apparatus for border node behavior mode
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Dec 20, 2007 at 5:22am
An Apple patent (number 2007029449) for a method and apparatus for border node behavior mode on a full-duplex bus has appeared at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. It relates to bus management, especially to the behavior of border nodes within a high performance serial bus system.
Here’s Apple’s description of the invention: “A method for determining and communicating the existence of a hybrid bus is disclosed, comprising the acts of: determining whether the node is a border node; forwarding isochronous and asynchronous requests as normal if the node is not a border node; and if the node is a border node, then; determining whether the node has any asynchronous requests to forward; issuing a Border_low request if there are no asynchronous requests to forward; forwarding the asynchronous requests if there are asynchronous requests to forward; determining whether there are any isochronous requests to forward; issuing a Border_low request if there are no isochronous requests to forward; and forwarding the isochronous requests if there are isochronous requests to forward.
Apple says a method and apparatus relating to the behavior of border nodes within a high performance serial bus system is disclosed. A method for determining and communicating the existence of a hybrid bus is disclosed. A method for determining a path to a senior border node is disclosed, as is a method for identifying a senior border node Various methods for properly issuing gap tokens within a beta cloud are disclosed.
The inventors are Jerrold V. Hauck and Colin Whitby-Strevens.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
