Patent attributes
A hybrid bus apparatus is provided. The hybrid bus apparatus includes a hybrid bus bridge circuit configured to couple a master(s) with one or more auxiliary slaves via heterogeneous communication buses. The hybrid bus bridge circuit and the auxiliary slaves are associated with respective unique slave identifications (USIDs). The master(s) can only support a fixed number of the USIDs, and thus a fixed number of the auxiliary slaves. The hybrid bus bridge circuit is configured to opportunistically mask some or all of the auxiliary slaves such that the respective USIDs associated with the masked auxiliary slaves can be reused by the master(s) to support additional slaves. As such, it may be possible to extend the capability of the master(s) to support more slaves than the fixed number of USIDs the master(s) can provide, thus enabling flexible heterogeneous bus deployment in an electronic device incorporating the hybrid bus apparatus.
