Abstract: A method and apparatus for more-quickly locating an individual during a man-down situation is provided herein. During operation a light source on an officer's vehicle will be directed towards the downed officer when a man-down situation has been identified. Since a light source will be pointed at the downed individual, respondents responding to the man-down situation may more-quickly locate any downed individual.

Abstract: A method of implementing a geometry per wedge (GPW) based headerless solution in a disk drive formatter having a corresponding memory buffer. The disk drive formatter includes high and low processing engines and formats a data storage disk. The method includes the step of processing a command instruction, which instructs the high-level processing engine to execute a disk operation with respect to a predetermined sector. The method also includes the steps of searching for the predetermined sector using sector layout information derived from a GPW table including entries which define the relative position of sector pulses on a track within a data wedge of the disk, and transferring the predetermined sector from the disk to the buffer memory.

Abstract: An apparatus is employed for providing for efficient communication between high level and low level processing engines in a disk formatter for formatting a disk, the high-level engine outputting at least one instruction to control disk operations to the low-level engine which processes the instruction. The apparatus includes an instruction queue within the low-level engine. The instruction queue stores the instruction received by the low level processing engine from the high level processing engine, which outputs the instruction to the memory in accordance with a first clock signal generated by the high-level engine. The instruction queue outputs the instruction in accordance with a second clock signal of the low level processing engine which corresponds to a predetermined disk transfer rate. In accordance with another embodiment of the present invention, a method is also employed for providing for efficient communication between high and low level processing engines in a disk formatter for formatting a disk.

Abstract: A programmable disk formatter for a disk controller in a headerless hard disk drive (HDD) system is disclosed. The disk formatter includes a high level processing engine that generates on the fly low level instructions that are executed by a low level processing engine. The disk formatter also includes a servo interface for interfacing the disk formatter to the servo timing logic, sector direct memory access (SDMA), and a QT/SP interface for interfacing the disk formatter to other processors in the disk controller, such as a system processor (SP) or Q-transmogrifier (QT) processor. The high level engine and low level engine operate semi-independently. The former processes SP- or QT-converted host computer commands in such a fashion that the low level instructions are generated and passed by the high level engine in time for the low level engine to execute them in coordination with the disk data rate.