Patent ID: 7505684

Claim:
An optical transmitter comprising: at least one processor; a persistent memory that includes one or more write-protected memory locations that includes loader microcode that is executable by the at least one processor, the loader microcode including one or more processor-executable instructions that, when executed by the at least one processor, implement a boot loader module in a system memory of the optical transmitter, wherein the boot loader module causes the optical transmitter to perform the following when the optical transmitter detects that some of the microcode is to be updated: an act of processing received microcode; an act of causing at least the processed representation of the received microcode to be written to the persistent memory of the optical transmitter outside of the one or more write-protected memory locations; an act of determining that all of the microcode that is to be written to the persistent memory during the update has been written to the persistent memory; and an act of altering persistent memory to reflect that the update is complete.