Patent ID: 7634696

Claim:
A method comprising: performing a first initializing operation on a memory comprising a plurality of bits to initialize each bit of the plurality of bits to zero; initializing a first register to all zeros; retrieving a value, for each of the plurality of bits from the memory after performing the first initializing operation; applying a logical OR operation to each of the retrieved values with the retrieved value as a first operand and a corresponding value of the first register as a second operand to produce a result value for each application of the logical OR operation; performing a second initializing operation on the memory to initialize each bit of the plurality of bits to one; initializing a second register to all ones; retrieving a value for each of the plurality of bits from the memory after performing the second initializing operation; and applying a logical AND operation to each of the retrieved values with the retrieved value as a first operand and a corresponding value of the second register as a second operand to produce a result value for each application of the logical AND operation.