Abstract: Various embodiments are described herein for a system and a method for increasing reliability of a secondary storage device used with a computing system where the secondary storage device contains a memory buffer, a controller, and non-volatile memory. The method may comprise initializing a test of the memory buffer; testing at least one memory block of the memory buffer; discontinuing use of a given memory block of the memory buffer if a defective memory location is detected for the given memory block; and storing test results for the memory buffer.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for the calculation of the reciprocal of a normalized mantissa M for a floating-point input number D. A formula for determining the minimum size for the look-up table in accordance with the required precision is provided, as well as formulas for calculating look-up table entries. The look-up table stores the initiation approximations and the correction coefficients, which are addressed by the corresponding number of the mantissa's most significant bits and used to obtain the initial approximation of the reciprocal by means of linear interpolation requiring one subtraction operation and one multiplication operation. The result of the linear interpolation may be fed to a Newton-Raphson iteration device requiring, for each iteration, two multiplication operations and one two's complement operation, thereby doubling the precision of the reciprocal.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for the data-driven synchronous parallel processing of digital data, which temporally separates the processes of instructions distributions and data requests from the process of actual data processing. The method includes the steps of: dividing the stream of digital data into data packets, consecutively distributing instructions to data processing units before their execution, consecutively synchronously processing data packets by multiple data processing units processing in parallel, and synchronization of parallel multiple data processing units by data tokens attached to the data packets.

Abstract: A method and device for performing digital signal magnetic recording and reproduction in analog format on a medium, using a conventional analog video tape recorder (VTR). The digital signal is digitally modulated and inserted into the active part of scan lines of a standard composite video signal, and converted to an analog signal for storage on the medium. When the signal is reproduced from the medium, the analog signal is converted to a digital composite video signal, and the modulated data is extracted from the active part of the scan lines and demodulated to restore the original digital signal. To improve the synchronization between the demodulation and modulation stages, during demodulation the color burst of the composite video signal may be used as a pilot signal to recover the sampling clock and regenerate the one or multiple carriers. Error correction coding may be employed to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio of the reproduced signal.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for the calculation of the reciprocal of a normalized mantissa M for a floating-point input number D. A formula for determining the minimum size for the look-up table in accordance with the required precision is provided, as well as formulas for calculating look-up table entries. The look-up table stores the initiation approximations and the correction coefficients, which are addressed by the corresponding number of the mantissa's most significant bits and used to obtain the initial approximation of the reciprocal by means of linear interpolation requiring one subtraction operation and one multiplication operation. The result of the linear interpolation may be fed to a Newton-Raphson iteration device requiring, for each iteration, two multiplication operations and one two's complement operation, thereby doubling the precision of the reciprocal.