Abstract: A rail spike retention and tie preserving mixture and method are disclosed for use in a wood cross tie at the situs of a driven rail spike, the mixture providing a single stage dry mixture application and including ground petroleum pitch, sub-angular silica sand and a hydrocarbon resin adhesive/sealant material. The mixture and method assure better spike retention in the tie while protecting the wood tie from degradation at and around the site of spike placement thus increasing the useful life of the tie.

Abstract: An integrated digital logic circuit includes a free-running secondary clock oscillator for generating free-running clocking pulses and a frequency-stabilized master oscillator for generating primary clocking pulses. A clock signal selector selects and puts out either the secondary clocking pulses or the primary clocking pulses depending upon integrated circuit operations/applications. A method for rapidly generating clocking signals during an integrated circuit start-up interval is also described.

Abstract: An improved disk drive architecture includes a microcontroller interface circuit connected between a drive microcontroller and a buffer controller. The microcontroller interface circuit includes address mapping registers for mapping at least one predetermined portion of directly addressable memory of the microcontroller to address locations of the drive's cache buffer. The buffer controller circuit includes an access arbitration circuit for arbitrating requests for access to the cache buffer by the drive's data sequencer, the drive's host interface controller and the drive's microcontroller. A microcontroller wait state generator responds to the access arbitration circuit by generating and applying a wait state sequence to the microcontroller until a request it makes for access to the cache buffer can be executed.