ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 8 -- United States Patent no. 12,437,121, issued on Oct. 7, was assigned to SiFive Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).
"Efficient processing of masked memory accesses" was invented by Andrew Waterman (Berkeley, Calif.) and Krste Asanovic (Oakland, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Disclosed herein are systems and methods for processing masked memory accesses including handling fault exceptions and checking memory attributes of memory region(s) to be accessed. Implementations perform a two-level memory protection violation scheme for masked vector memory instructions. The first level memory check ignores mask information associated with a masked vector memory instruction and ...