ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 30 -- United States Patent no. 12,373,242, issued on July 29, was assigned to Texas Instruments Inc. (Dallas).

"Entering protected pipeline mode without annulling pending instructions" was invented by Duc Bui (Grand Prairie, Texas) and Timothy D. Anderson (University Park, Texas).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Techniques related to executing a plurality of instructions by a processor comprising receiving a first instruction for execution on an instruction execution pipeline, wherein the instruction execution pipeline is in a first execution mode, and wherein the first instruction is configured to utilize a first memory location, begin execution of the first instruction on...