Patent ID: 7215670

Claim:
A computer peripheral device for receiving Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) communications from a communications facility and forwarding the communications to a host computer, comprising: a communications interface for coupling to the communications facility and receiving communications therefrom; a processing device, coupled to the communications interface, for processing communications received at the communications interface and for temporarily storing the processed communications as ATM cells having a header portion and a payload portion; a USB port for coupling to the host system by way of a Universal Serial Bus connection; and a USB interface device, coupled to the USB port and to the processing device, for performing reassembly of received ATM communications, comprising: shared memory, for buffering data corresponding to at least one ATM virtual connection, the data corresponding to each ATM virtual connection being accessible at a corresponding endpoint location in the shared memory; a USB interface module, coupled to the USB port, for controlling access to the shared memory by the host computer; and an ATM receive controller, for reading ATM cells from the processing device, for determining the virtual connection for each read ATM cell from its header portion, and for writing the payload portion of each read ATM cell to the shared memory at the endpoint location corresponding to the determined virtual connection for the read ATM cell.