US Patent 7526676 Slave device having independent error recovery

A slave device adapted to couple to a master processor and including an error handler and a communication controller. The error handler is configured to detect errors internal to the slave device and, in response to detecting at least one error and independent of the master processor, configured to select an error recovery operation based on the at least one detected error and to initiate and perform the selected error recovery operation. The communication controller is configured to communicate with the master processor according to a master/slave protocol, and configured to maintain the master/slave protocol during performance of the selected error recovery operation by the error handler.