Appeal No. 1996-1097
Application 08/058,110
This is a decision on appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134 from
the final rejection of claims 1-12.
We reverse.
BACKGROUND
The disclosed invention relates to a memory efficient
computer system and method for controlling an automotive
ignition system. As shown in figure 1, the ignition system
has ignition coils 12 organized, for example, into two
banks, BANK 1 and BANK 2, with various input/output (I/O)
devices 18 relaying signals to and from the ignition coil
banks. The computer system memory 20 includes a read only
memory (ROM) 36 for storing program routines and a random
access memory (RAM) 34 for storing data. Figure 2 shows a
partial map of the RAM segment 34. RAM 34 is organized into
sets of registers 38 that store ignition coil input and
output signals relayed by I/O devices 18. Importantly,
there is a constant address offset (in this case six bytes)
between corresponding sets of registers in BANK 1 and
BANK 2. "For example, the COIL2_H register associated with
one ignition coil bank 14 [BANK 2] has a hexadecimal address
of $0006, which is offset by six bytes in the RAM segment 34
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