Importance

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Abstract

Hot-insertion/removal, herein used interchangeably with hot-docking/undocking, would enable the connection or disconnection of a fully powered bus to an expansion device with no damage or data loss to either device. Previous docking solutions typically require the docking bus to be placed into a power-off or power-managed state, which means the user would have to consciously place the system into a power-off or power-managed state before an insertion or removal could occur. The hot-docking/undocking invention is completely transparent to the end user, so it would provide tremendous flexibility and seamless insertions and removals. Hot-docking/undocking is composed of three elements: a detection of a docking/undocking situation; a placement of the docking bus into a static state; and a system reconfiguration. The present invention places the docking bus into an static state through the use of a special handshaking protocol and clock and reset signals on the expansion device. The entire mechanism can be applied in both the insertion and removal of a power-on bus to and from an expansion device.

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First Claim