Patent ID: 7334108

Claim:
A translation lookaside buffer system for translating virtual addresses to physical addresses, the system comprising: an input arbitration module configured to receive translation requests from a plurality of clients, each translation request including a target virtual address, the input arbitration module further configured to select one of the translation requests for processing; a primary cluster store having a plurality of locations, each location configured to store a cluster, wherein each cluster provides a mapping to a respective physical address for each virtual address in a range of virtual address space, wherein the respective ranges of different ones of the clusters have different sizes, and wherein each cluster includes a plurality of references to blocks of physical addresses such that the virtual addresses in the range mapped by the cluster are mapped to the blocks of physical addresses; a primary lookup logic circuit coupled to receive the selected translation request from the input arbitration module and configured to associate one of the locations in the primary cluster store with the selected translation request, thereby designating the associated location for storing a target cluster whose range includes the target virtual address; and a translation module configured to translate the target virtual address of the selected translation request to a physical address based at least in part on the mapping provided by the cluster stored in the primary cluster store location associated with the selected translation request.