ATI Technologies Assigned Patent

ATI Technologies ULC, Markham, Ontario, Canada, has been assigned a patent (9,372,635) developed by Xie, Bin, Richmond Hill, Canada, for a “methods and apparatus for dividing secondary storage.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”Methods and apparatus for restricting access by one or more processors to an area of a secondary storage unit are presented herein. The methods and apparatus may comprise an independent programmable storage controller logic that divides a storage area of the secondary storage unit into at least a first area and a second area and controls usage of the areas as at least two virtual secondary storage units such that the processor(s) access the at least two virtual secondary storage units as if accessing at least two physical secondary storage units by selecting one of the at least two virtual secondary storage units as an active virtual secondary storage unit to provide the processor(s) access to the active virtual secondary storage unit based on a secondary storage unit configuration. Each virtual secondary storage unit may contain at least one region of which an access permission setting is modifiable.“

The patent application was filed on June 3, 2014 (14/294,211).