Patent Application
20130287126
The presently disclosed embodiments are directed to the field of communication, and more specifically, to power line communication.
Power line communication (PLC) is a communication technology to carry data on electrical media (e.g., wires) that are used for electrical power transmission. Typically, electrical power is transmitted over high voltage transmission lines, distributed over medium voltage, and used inside commercial or residential buildings at lower voltages. Since power line networks transmit data signals over the same electrical grid as that is used for carrying electrical power to commercial or residential buildings, electrical wires and sockets are used simultaneously for electricity and for data transmission, without causing disruption to either.
Broadband technologies provide high speed data transmission. However, currently it is problematic to apply broadband technologies in PLC. Some problems include the ability to efficiently decode signals in noisy channels, achieve time and frequency diversity, remove signal interference, maintain received signals at pre-determined levels, measure channel quality for high transmission rate, provide robustness to wideband and narrow band symbol synchronization.
One disclosed feature of the embodiments is a method and apparatus to cancel signal interference. A jammer remover removes an interfering signal from an input signal to generate a jammer-canceled signal using an adaptive filtering procedure. A jammer detector detects interference caused by the interfering signal.
Embodiments may best be understood by referring to the following description and accompanying drawings that are used to illustrate various embodiments. In the drawings.
One disclosed feature of the embodiments is a method and apparatus to cancel signal interference. A jammer remover removes an interfering signal from an input signal to generate a jammer-canceled signal using an adaptive filtering procedure. A jammer detector detects interference caused by the interfering.
One disclosed feature of the embodiments may be described as a process which is usually depicted as a flowchart, a flow diagram, a structure diagram, or a block diagram. Although a flowchart may describe the operations as a sequential process, many of the operations can be performed in parallel or concurrently. In addition, the order of the operations may be re-arranged. A process is terminated when its operations are completed. A process may correspond to a method, a program, a procedure, a method of manufacturing or fabrication, etc. One embodiment may be described by a schematic drawing depicting a physical structure. It is understood that the schematic drawing illustrates the basic concept and may not be scaled or depict the structure in exact proportions.
One disclosed feature of the embodiments is the implementation of a data communication modem for Federal Communication Commission (FCC), Association of Radio Industries and Businesses (ARIB), and European Committee of electrotechnical standardization or Comité Européen de Normalisation Electrotecnique (CENELEC) bands over the power line medium. The system may include a highly integrated PHY (physical layer) and MAC (Media Access Control) digital transceiver and analog front end processing circuits. The system is based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). OFDM has been chosen as the modulation technique because of its inherent adaptability in the presence of frequency selective channels, its resilience to jammer signals, and its robustness to impulsive noise.
The OFDM system may place Ncarrier evenly spaced carriers into a specified frequency band such as from DC to 1.2 MHz. In one embodiment, Ncarrier=128. In the following description, the value Ncarrier=128 will be used for illustrative purposes. It is contemplated that Ncarrier may be any suitable number. Depending on the band selection, number of carriers participating in transporting data varies. Every carrier may be modulated with Differential Binary Phase Shift Keying (DBPSK). The system may support two modes of operation namely Normal and ROBO (Robust OFDM). The ROBO modulation is robust in the sense that it may provide four times extra redundancy parity bits by mean of repetition code and therefore the system may reliably deliver data under severe channel conditions.
The system parameters include signal frequency bands, modulation schemes, sampling frequency and physical layer frame structure, etc. The system supports various CELENEC, FCC and ARIB bands. The frequency band associated with each standard is given in Table 1.
An OFDM with DBPSK modulation scheme per carrier may be selected. The OFDM modulation technique is very robust against channel fading, narrowband interference and spike noise. The DBPSK modulation for each carrier may make the receiver design significantly simple since no tracking circuitry is required at the receiver for coherently detecting the phase of each carrier. In DBPSK demodulator, the phases of carriers in adjacent symbol may be taken as the reference for detecting the phases of the carriers in the current symbol. The phases of corresponding carriers in adjacent OFDM symbols may be expected to be stationary since the channel and the clock frequency variations in time are very slow as compared to the duration of two adjacent symbols.
Assuming the maximum spectral content of the signal is 480 KHz, the sampling frequency at the transmitter and receiver may be selected to be 1.2 MHz that is about 240 KHz above the Nyquist rate to provide a sufficient margin for signal filtering in the transmitter (for PSD shaping to remove the signal images) and at the receiver (for band selection and signal enhancement).
The number of frequency bins (FFT points) may be any suitable number. In one embodiment, this number is selected to be N=256. This results in a frequency resolution for the OFDM carriers equal to 4.6875 KHz (Fs/N). Note that imperfection such as sampling clock frequency variation may cause Inter Carrier Interference (ICI). In practice, the ICI caused by a typical sampling frequency variation about 2% of frequency resolution is negligible. In other word, considering ±20 ppm sampling frequency in transmitter and receiver clocks, the drift of the carriers may be approximately equal to 48 Hz that is approximately 1.26% of the selected frequency resolution. Considering these selections, the number of usable carriers for each standard may be obtained as given in Table 2.
The system may work in two different modes namely Normal and ROBO modes. In Normal mode, the FEC may include a Reed Solomon encoder and a convolutional encoder. The system may also support Reed Solomon code with parity of 8 and 16 Bytes.
In ROBO mode (robust modulation scheme) the FEC may include Reed Solomon and convolutional encoders followed by a Repetition Code (RC). The RC code may repeat each bit four times making system more robust to channel impairments. This of course may reduce the throughput by a factor of 4. The FEC parameters for RS parity of 8 may be given in Table 3.
The number of symbols in each PHY (Physical Layer) frame may be selected based on two parameters, the required data rate and the acceptable delay. Since high bandwidth standard (FCC, ARIB) may be utilized for some delay sensitive applications such as voice transmission, therefore the number of symbols in PHY frame may be selected less that that of low bandwidth standard (CENELEC). The number of symbols and data rate associated with each band may be tabulated in Table 4. To calculate the data rate, the packets may be assumed to be continuously transmitted with no inter frame time gap.
The data rate may be calculated based on the number of symbols per PHY frame (NS), number of carrier per symbol (Ncarr) and number of parity bits added by FEC blocks. As an example, consider the system in the FCC band working in ROBO mode. Total number of bits carried by the whole PHY frame may be equal to:
Total_No_Bits=NS×Ncarr=40×100=4000 bits
The number of bits required at the input of ROBO encoder may be given by:
No_Bits_ROBO=4000×ROBORate=4000×¼=1000 bits
Considering the fact that convolutional encoder may have a rate equal to ½ (CCRrate=½) and also consider adding CCZerotail=6 bits of zeros to terminate the states of the encoder to all zero states then the maximum number of symbols at the output of Reed Solomon encoder (MAXRSbytes) may be equal to:
MAXRSbytes=floor((No_Bits_ROBO×CCRate×CCZeroTail)/8)=floor((1000×½−6)/8)=61
Symbols:
Removing 8 symbols associated with the parity bits, we may obtain:
DataLength=(61−ParityLength)×8=424 bits
These 424 bits may be carried within the duration of a PHY frame. The duration of a PHY frame may be calculated by the following formula:
T_Frame=((NS×(N_CP+N−NO)+(Npre×N)))/Fs
where Npre, N, NO and N_CP are the number of samples in the preamble, FFT length, the number of samples overlapped at each side of one symbol and the number of samples in the cyclic prefix, respectively. The Fs is the sampling frequency. Typical values for all these parameters for various frequency bands may be given in Table 5.
Replacing the above numbers in the equation, T-Frame (PHY frame duration) may be obtained as follows:
T_Frame=(40×(256+22)+(9.5×256))/1200000=0.0112 sec.
Therefore the data rate may be calculated by:
Data rate=424/0.0112˜37 kbps
Signal Types:
There are 2 transmission commands to the physical layer as described below.
The preamble 110 may include 8 identical P symbols and 1½ identical M symbols. Each symbol may be 256 samples and may be pre-stored in the transmitter and may be transmitted right before the data symbols. The symbols P may be used for AGC adaptation, symbol synchronization, channel estimation and initial phase reference estimation. For M symbols, two types of symbol may be used. One is the M1 in which all the carriers may be π phase shifted and the other one is M2 in which all the carriers may be π/2 phase shifted. M1 is used in ROBO mode and M2 may be used in Normal mode. At the receiver, the phase distance between symbol P and symbol M waveforms may be used for frame synchronization purpose. And the distance between the phases of two possible M symbols may be used to detect whether the PHY frame is sent in Normal mode or in ROBO mode.
The preamble 310 for CENELECs B, C & BC bands may include for special symbols labeled as F1F2 symbols, followed by four identical P symbols and 1½ identical M symbols. For CENELEC C, each F1F2 symbol may include three sinewaves whose phases may switch by 180° after 256 samples. Hence, we generate 256 samples of each of the three tones and sum them together, then we add 180° phase shift to each of the three tones and generate another 257 samples, so that the total length of an F1F2 symbol may be 513 samples. For CENELECs B & BC, six tones may be used instead of three, but the length of the F1F2 symbols remains unchanged. The F1F2 symbols may be used for synchronization. Each preamble symbol may contain 513 samples. The reason that we have used a different technique for synchronization is that the allocated bandwidth in CENELECs C, B and BC may be too small, which makes the autocorrelation property of the P symbols not good enough for robust synchronization. As a result, F1F2 symbols may be used. They have much better autocorrelation property. As for the P symbols for narrowband, they may still be used for channel estimation and initial phase reference estimation, same as was the case for wideband. The symbols M1 or M2 proposed for FCC, ARIB and CENELEC standards are also used for narrowband for the same purposes (frame synchronization and mode detection).
This may simplifies the system, as only one waveform need to be stored in the transmitter and same detection circuit in the receiver as used for preamble detection, is used for ACK signal detection as well. If no signal is received during the specified period, it is interpreted as a NACK signal.
The base-band transmitter 700 may receive its input bits in one packet from the Media Access (MAC) Layer. The FEC encoding unit 710 may include a number of FEC encoders. Each FEC encoder may add parity bits to the data and the packet grows as it goes through various blocks in FEC encoding unit 710. At the end of the FEC encoding unit 710, the final packet may be broken down into small packet so that each small packet may be fitted into one OFDM symbol. The size of one small packet depends on the number of carriers used in each OFDM symbol. For example, in FCC band, the packet size becomes equal to 100 bits. In order to understand the size of data as well as signal dimensions at each various points in the transmitter baseband, the calculation method may be described in the following.
Packet size calculation:
The total number of bits carried by a PHY frame may be obtained by:
N
E
=N
G=Ncarr×Ns
The NF and NG may represent the size of packet (signal) at nodes (F) and (G), respectively. Where Ncarr is the number of carriers in each OFDM symbol and Ns is the number of symbols per PHY frame. Note that the Interleaver does not change the size of packet. The number of bits at point (E) may be given by:
N
E
=N
E
×R
The value R may be one for Normal mode and ¼ for ROBO Mode. In order to find M, the number of zeros may need to be padded at the output of convolutional encoder; first we need to calculate the maximum number of RS bytes. The maximum number of RS bytes (MaxRSbytes) at the output of RS encoder may be obtained by the following equation:
MaxRSbytes=floor ((NE×CCRate−CCZeroTail)/8)
Where CCRate and CCZeroTail are the convolutional code rate (½) and the number of zeros to be added to the input of convolutional encoder (to terminate the states to zero state), respectively. And “8” refers to the length of each RS word that is one byte. Therefore, the value of M may be obtained by:
M=N
E−((MaxRSbytes×8)+6)×2
Table 6 shows the number of zeroes padded after convolutional encoder for various bands.
The number of bits at point (D), (C) and (B) now may be calculated by:
N
D
=N
E
−M,N
C
=N
D/2,NB=NC−6
Finally, considering the fact the number of parity bytes in RS code may be equal to 8, the packet size delivered by MAC to the physical layer may be given by:
N
A=(NB/8−8)×8
Table 7 summarizes the input packet to the physical layer for various band and both normal and ROBO modes. It should be noted that CENELEC B and CENELEC C ROBO may not be able to have long header format (48-bit addressing) and RS parity of 16 Bytes at the same time because of the size of the packet limitations.
The packet size at various nodes in the FEC encoding unit 710 for each band (CENELEC (A,B,BC)/FCC/ARIB) may be calculated and summarized in Tables 8A, 8B, 8C, 8D, 8E, and 8F. The nodes A, B, C, D, E, and F are shown in
preamble
The FEC encoders may include Reed Solomon encoder 820 followed by convolutional encoder 840. In ROBO mode, an extra encoder namely Repetition Code (RC) or ROBO encoder 860 may be used after the convolutional encoder 840 that repeats the bits at the output of convolutional encoder 840 four times.
The data scrambler 810 may help give the data a random distribution.
The RS encoder 820 encodes data from the scrambler 810. The RS encoder 820 may be may be created by shortening RS (255,247, t=4) and (255,239, t=8) code. The “RS symbol word length” (i.e., the size of the data words used in the Reed-Solomon block) may be fixed at 8 bits. The value of t (number of word errors that can be corrected) may be either 4 or 8 for different standards. For CENELEC B and C ROBO the RS parity of 8 Bytes (corresponding to t=4) should be used. The number of parity words in a RS-block is thus 2t words. The number of non-parity data words (bytes) in Reed-Solomon encoder 820 may be provided in Table 3. The first bit in time from the data scrambler 810 may become the most significant bit of that symbol. Each RS encoder input block (consisting of 247 symbols) is conceptually formed by one or more fill symbols (“00000000”) followed by the message symbols. Output of the RS encoder (with fill symbols discarded) may proceed in time from first message symbol to last message symbol followed by parity symbols, with each symbol shifted out most significant bit first.
Code Generator Polynomial g (x)=(x−α1)(x−α2)(x−α3) . . . (x−α8)
Field Generator Polynomial: p (x)=x8+x4+x3+x2+1 (435 octal)
The representation of a° is “00000001”, where the left most bit of this RS symbol is the MSB and is first in time from the scrambler 810 and is the first in time out of the RS encoder 820. The packet size (in Bytes) at the input and output of RS encoder 820 (NA and NB) may be given in Table 9.
The zero padding 830 may pad six zeroes after the RS encoder 820.
When the last bit of data to the convolutional encoder 840 may have been received, the convolutional encoder 840 may insert six tail bits, which may be required to return the convolutional encoder 840 to the “zero state”. This may improve the error probability of the convolutional decoder, which relies on future bits when decoding. The tail bits may be defined as six zeros. The number of bits at the input and the output of convolutional encoder may be given in Table 10.
The zero padding 850 may pad M zeroes after the convolutional encoder 840. M is given in Table 6.
The ROBO encoder 860 repeats the resulting packet after adding M number of zeros to the packet four times in ROBO mode. The ROBO encoder 860 may be only activated in ROBO mode. The repeat code may be implemented inside the interleaver 880. The switch 870 selects whether to bypass the ROBO encoder 860 or uses the output of the ROBO encoder 860 in ROBO mode.
The interleaver 880 interleaves the data packet selected from the switch 870. It may be used for both normal mode and ROBO mode. The interleaver 880 may use a linear block interleaver and may achieve the same performance of a random interleaver using a simpler architecture with less computation.
The un-buffer 890 breaks down the final packet into small packet so that each small packet may be fitted into one OFDM symbol, as described earlier.
The mapper 1110 map data bits for differential modulation. Each phase vector may use its predecessor (same carrier, previous symbol) as phase reference. The mapping function for DBPSK may be given in Table 11.
The initial phase for the first symbol are the carrier phases of the preamble symbol and are provided in Table 12. Each value in Table 12 may be a multiple integer of π/8 and may be quantized by 4 bits. The preamble phase reference index in Table 12 may start from 1 and it may refer to the first carrier in the corresponding band as given in Table 13. Note that the carrier index may be numbered from 0 to 127. This may be been illustrated in
The IFFT 1030 may take the 256-point IFFT of the input vector and may generate the main 256 time domain OFDM words preceded by N_CP words of cyclic prefix. In other words, the last N_CP samples at the output of the IFFT 1030 may be taken and placed in front of symbol. The useful output may be the real part of the IFFT coefficients.
In order to reduce the out of band emission and to reduce the spectral side lobe, a window function may be applied. In one embodiment, the Raised Cosine shaping 1210 may be applied to all the data symbols. Then the tails and heads of successive symbols may be overlapped and added together by the overlapping 1220. This process is described below. Each side of a symbol may be first shaped by the raised cosine function as shown in
The windowing function at each 8-sample boundary may be a Raised Cosine function and its values are given in Table 14. The window function may have a value equal to one at other samples. Then the 8 tail and 8 head shaped samples of the symbol from each side of symbol may be overlapped with the tail and head samples of adjacent symbols as shown in
Memory locations may need to be allocated in the baseband to store the preamble samples. The preamble samples may be prepared in advance and download into the baseband memory during initialization period by the processor that implements the MAC layer. Each sample of preamble symbol may have an 8-bit length. The preamble signal that may be added to the beginning of each PHY frame may be shown in
A time-domain pre-emphasis filter 1230 may be a linear equalization method where the transmit signal spectrum may be shaped to compensate for amplitude distortion. The purpose of this filter may be to provide frequency shaping to the transmit signal in order to compensate for attenuation introduced to the signal as it goes through the power line.
The pre-emphasis filter 1230 may be a first order recursive filter with transfer function of H(z)=0.5[(Gamma+Beta*ẑ−1)/(1−R*ẑ−1)]. It may be specified with below deference equation:
y(n)=0.5*[Gamma*x(n)+Beta*x(n−1)+R*y(n−1)]
As shown, the pre-emphasis filter 1230 may have one zero and one pole. In this implementation Gamma, Beta, and R may be programmable and may be assigned 16-bit registers. The pre-emphasis filter 1230 may be the last block in the transmit path right before the output formatter 750. The pre-emphasis filter may have the following register requirements: an enable/disable bit to enable/bypass the pre-emphasis filter, a Gamma register (signed 16 bits): parameter to control the shape of the pre-emphasis filter, a Beta register (signed 16 bits): parameter to control the shape of the pre-emphasis filter, and an R register (signed 16 bits): parameter to control the shape of the pre-emphasis filter.
The frequency-domain pre-emphasis filter may include of a multiplier that may multiply the complex frequency domain samples of an OFDM symbol with 128 real filter coefficients, then do four right shifts at the output. The filter coefficients may be 5 bits representing unsigned values from 0 h to 10 h. The filter coefficients may not be allowed to have values larger than 10 h. The filter may multiply the first 128 frequency-domain complex samples of an OFDM symbol with the 128 real coefficients of the filter. The rest of the 128 frequency-domain samples of the OFDM symbol may be usually set to zero and may not be multiplied by the filter coefficients. As the block diagram below shows, the input complex samples may be 8 bits each while the filter coefficients may be 5 unsigned bits each. Since the maximum allowed value of any filter coefficients may be 10 h, the output of the multiplication may be 12 bits (not 13 bits). The output may then be right shifted by 4 to get a final output of 8 bits that may be used as input to the IFFT.
The filter coefficient values may vary from 0 to 16, and since we do 4 right shifts at the output, it follows that the filter may provide the following attenuation for any of the 128 carriers:
The following registers may be needed to control the frequency-domain pre-emphasis filter: Enable/Disable bit: Allows for enabling/disabling the filter.
In order to control the transmitted power level of P and M in relation to power level of data two scalers may be implemented in the transmitter: a Data scaler to scale the data, and a P/M scaler to control the levels of the P & M that we are now generating from the frequency domain using the IFFT. Both scalers may be described below. On the receiver path, no scaling may be needed.
The data scaler may have identical block to the P/M scaler except that P_scale_factor is renamed to Data_scale_factor, and P_shift_factor is renamed to Data_shift_factor, where both may remain 8 bits each. The table shows the default values for the data scalers for the different standards.
On the receiver side, the PHY layer may receive its input samples from the power line and may hand the demodulated data bits over to the MAC layer. The processing unit 1830 may include a first infinite impulse response (IIR) filter 1832, a second IIR filter 1834, a jammer canceller 1836, and a root mean square (RMS) module 1838. The jammer canceller 1836 removes interference or a jamming signal in the input signal. The symbol synchronizer 1852 and the frame synchronizer 1854 may be used for preamble (ACK signal) detection, symbol and frame synchronization. The frame synchronizer 1854 and the preamble FFT coefficient buffer 1860 may be used to perform the initial preamble phase and the channel estimation, respectively.
The synchronizers 1852 and 1854 and the jammer canceller 1836 may be ON when the system is in the “Receive” mode. If the jammer or interfering signal may be present in the channel and detected, a switch may be set so that the signal may be taken from the output of the jammer canceller 1836. The jammer detector in the jammer canceller 1836 may do this automatically. The mode detector 1870 detects the mode of operation and sets an ACK flag 1872 or a ROBO flag 1874 as appropriate.
Two different synchronizer circuits, one for FCC, ARIB and CENELEC bands (Wideband OFDM) and another for CENELEC B, C and BC (Narrow band OFDM), may be used for different bands. The tasks for synchronizers may be the detection of preamble and obtaining the start of preamble symbol (symbol synchronizer) and the start of data symbol (frame synchronizer). As soon as the start of data symbol may be found, a switch may be moved to place the CP remover in the demodulator 1850 (
Once the symbol synchronizer identifies the start of preamble symbols, the initial channel estimator may be activated. At this time a switch may be set since there may be no cyclic prefix extension for preamble symbols. This block may measure the reference phase from the preamble. It may also measure the channel quality at each frequency bin. The channel estimator may also estimate the SNR for each carrier.
The ROBO flag 1874 may select the position of a switch in the FEC decoding unit 1880. Depending on the preamble waveform, the frame synchronizer 1854 may identify if the frame is in ROBO mode or in Normal Mode and the switch in the FEC decoding unit 1880 is set accordingly.
The data formatter 1810 may take the data bits from the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and may perform tasks including, scaling, and mapping to convenient signed value representation. The DC blocker 1815 may be used to remove the DC component of incoming data. Since A/D converters and analog front-end circuitry may not be expected to be totally DC free, this filter may remove the DC residual.
The bit de-interleaver 2020 may reverse the mappings described in the transmitter section.
The de-scrambler 2070 may reverse the scrambling action, done on the source information bits in the transmitter.
The jammer canceller is used to cancel tone interference on power-lines in a specified frequency range. In one embodiment, the frequency range is 5 kHz to 2 MHz. It may detect the presence of a jamming tone in the channel and removes it from the received signal. The benefit of this Jammer Canceller is that it differentiates a narrowband interference within a broadband signal and significantly reduces it without altering the broadband signal in any significant way. Such interference can cause severe loss of data at the receiver if it is not significantly reduced at the receiver side. By using an adaptive IIR filter to search for the interfering signal it may achieve better jammer cancellation than other jammer cancellers that use adaptive FIR filters. It may operate at very low frequency to remove low-frequency interference as low as 5 kHz.
The jammer remover 2710 removes an interfering signal from an input signal to generate a jammer-canceled signal using an adaptive filtering procedure. It may include a band-pass filter 2712, an adaptation circuit 2714, and a subtractor 2716. The band-pass filter 2712 has a resonant frequency to band-pass the input signal to produce a band-passed signal. In one embodiment, the band-pass filter is a second-order infinite impulse response (IIR) filter. The adaptation circuit 2714 varies the resonant frequency adaptively using a stochastic gradient based procedure. In one embodiment, the adaptation circuit varies the resonant frequency using a least mean square (LMS) procedure. The subtractor 2716 generates an error signal using the input signal and the band-passed signal. The error signal represents the jammer-canceled signal.
The jammer detector 2720 detects interference caused by the interfering signal. It may include an energy detector 2722, a comparator 2724, and a jammer flag generator 2726. The energy detector 2722 generates a signal energy in the band-passed signal. The comparator 2724 compares the signal energy with a pre-determined threshold. When the signal energy exceeds the threshold, it may be determined that interference is present in the input signal. The jammer flag generator 2726 generates an indicator that indicates if the interfering signal is present in the input signal.
The selector 2730 selects the input signal or the jammer-canceled signal according to the indicator. The selector 2730 is controlled by the indicator from the jammer flag generator 2726. The selector 2730 has two positions. At position 1, the input signal is selected. At position 2, the output of the jammer remover 2710 is selected.
Elements of one embodiment may be implemented by hardware, firmware, software or any combination thereof. The term hardware generally refers to an element having a physical structure such as electronic, electromagnetic, optical, electro-optical, mechanical, electro-mechanical parts, etc. A hardware implementation may include analog or digital circuits, devices, processors, applications specific integrated circuits (ASICs), programmable logic devices (PLDs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), or any electronic devices. The term software generally refers to a logical structure, a method, a procedure, a program, a routine, a process, an algorithm, a formula, a function, an expression, etc. The term firmware generally refers to a logical structure, a method, a procedure, a program, a routine, a process, an algorithm, a formula, a function, an expression, etc., that is implemented or embodied in a hardware structure (e.g., flash memory, ROM, EPROM). Examples of firmware may include microcode, writable control store, micro-programmed structure. When implemented in software or firmware, the elements of an embodiment are essentially the code segments to perform the necessary tasks. The software/firmware may include the actual code to carry out the operations described in one embodiment, or code that emulates or simulates the operations.
The program or code segments can be stored in a processor or machine accessible medium. The “processor readable or accessible medium” or “machine readable or accessible medium” may include any medium that may store, transmit, receive, or transfer information. Examples of the processor readable or machine accessible medium that may store include a storage medium, an electronic circuit, a semiconductor memory device, a read only memory (ROM), a flash memory, an erasable programmable ROM (EPROM), a floppy diskette, a compact disk (CD) ROM, an optical disk, a hard disk, etc. The machine accessible medium may be embodied in an article of manufacture. The machine accessible medium may include information or data that, when accessed by a machine, cause the machine to perform the operations or actions described above. The machine accessible medium may also include program code, instruction or instructions embedded therein. The program code may include machine readable code, instruction or instructions to perform the operations or actions described above. The term “information” or “data” here refers to any type of information that is encoded for machine-readable purposes. Therefore, it may include program, code, data, file, etc.
All or part of an embodiment may be implemented by various means depending on applications according to particular features, functions. These means may include hardware, software, or firmware, or any combination thereof. A hardware, software, or firmware element may have several modules coupled to one another. A hardware module is coupled to another module by mechanical, electrical, optical, electromagnetic or any physical connections. A software module is coupled to another module by a function, procedure, method, subprogram, or subroutine call, a jump, a link, a parameter, variable, and argument passing, a function return, etc. A software module is coupled to another module to receive variables, parameters, arguments, pointers, etc. and/or to generate or pass results, updated variables, pointers, etc. A firmware module is coupled to another module by any combination of hardware and software coupling methods above. A hardware, software, or firmware module may be coupled to any one of another hardware, software, or firmware module. A module may also be a software driver or interface to interact with the operating system running on the platform. A module may also be a hardware driver to configure, set up, initialize, send and receive data to and from a hardware device. An apparatus may include any combination of hardware, software, and firmware modules.
It will be appreciated that various of the above-disclosed and other features and functions, or alternatives thereof, may be desirably combined into many other different systems or applications. Various presently unforeseen or unanticipated alternatives, modifications, variations, or improvements therein may be subsequently made by those skilled in the art which are also intended to be encompassed by the following claims.
This application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/478,684, filed Jun. 4, 2009. This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/059,709, filed on Jun. 6, 2008. The disclosures of the above applications are incorporated herein by reference in its their entirety.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 61059709 | Jun 2008 | US |
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent | 12478684 | Jun 2009 | US |
| Child | 13908523 | US |
