US Patent 7165193 Efficient memory allocation scheme for data collection

A system and method that provides an integrated circuit which includes a small on-chip buffer to store collected data, thereby shifting the burden of storing the majority of the collected data to external system memory, which is typically comprised of commodity memory chips. Since this external system memory is already in use by other system functions, utilizing such unused regions of this external memory increases overall hardware efficiency, while achieving lower ASIC manufacturing cost.