ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 4 -- United States Patent no. 12,323,336, issued on June 3, was assigned to Micron Technology Inc. (Boise, Idaho).

"Combined write enable mask and credit return field" was invented by Tony Brewer (Plano, Texas) and David Patrick (McKinney, Texas).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A credit return field is used in a credit-based flow control system to indicate that one or more credits are being returned to a sending device from a receiving device. Based on the number of credits available, the sending device determines whether to send device or wait until more credits are returned. A write enable mask allows a wide data field to be used even when a smaller amount of data is to ...