Apple has been granted three patents by the US Patent & Trademark Office. Following is a summary of each.

Patent number 8032181 is for a server provider activation with subscriber identity module policy. Systems and methods for activating a mobile device for use with a service provider are described. In one exemplary method, a mobile device having a currently inserted SIM card may be prepared for activation using a signing process in which an activation server generates a signed activation ticket encoded with SIM policy data that corresponds to the combination of the device and one of a number of SIM cards belonging to a set of SIM cards defined by the SIM policy data.

The activation ticket is securely stored on the mobile device. In another exemplary method the mobile device may be activated in an activation process in which the device verifies an activation ticket against information specific to the device and SIM card in accordance with the SIM policy in the activation ticket, and initiates activation when the verification of the activation ticket is successful. The inventors are Jerry Hauck, Jeffrey Bush, Michael Lambertus Huberetus Brouwer and Daryl Mun-Kid Low.

Patent number 8032670 involves a method and apparatus for generating DMA transfers to memory. In one embodiment, an apparatus comprises a first interface circuit, a direct memory access (DMA) controller coupled to the first interface circuit, and a host coupled to the DMA controller. The first interface circuit is configured to communicate on an interface according to a protocol. The host comprises at least one address space mapped, at least in part, to a plurality of memory locations in a memory system of the host.

The DMA controller is configured to perform DMA transfers between the first interface circuit and the address space, and the DMA controller is further configured to perform DMA transfers between a first plurality of the plurality of memory locations and a second plurality of the plurality of memory locations. The inventors are Dominic Go, Mark D. Hayter, Zongjian Chen and Ruchi Wadhawan.

Patent number 8032673 is for transaction ID filtering for buffered programming input/output (PIO) write acknowledgements. Per the patent, a PIO transaction unit includes an input buffer, a response buffer, and a control unit. The input buffer may receive and store PIO write operations sent by one or more transactons sources. Each PIO write operation may include a source identifier that identifies the transaction source. The response buffer may store response operations corresponding to respective PIO write operations that are to be transmitted to the transaction source identified by the identifier.

The control unit may store a particular response operation corresponding to the given PIO write operation in the response buffer prior to the given PIO write operation being sent from the input buffer. The control unit may store the particular response operation within the response buffer if the given PIO write operation is bufferable and there is no non-bufferable PIO write operation having a same source identifier stored in the input buffer. Sanjay Mansingh is the inventor.

-- Dennis Sellers