Apple has won several patents from the US Patent & Trademark Office. Following is a summary of each.

Patent number 8077096 is for slot antennas for electronic devices. The slot antennas may have a dielectric-filled slot that is formed in a ground plane element. The ground plane element may be formed from part of a conductive device housing. The slot may have one or more holes at its ends. The holes may affect the impedance characteristics of the slot antennas so that the length of the slot antennas may be reduced.

For example, the holes can be used to synthesize the impedance of the slot antennas so that the slot antennas have a resonant frequency that is different from their natural resonant frequency. The holes may affect the impedance of the slot antennas in multiple radio-frequency bands. The inventors are Bing Chiang, Douglas Blake Kough and Enrique Ayala Vazquez.

Patent number 8077182 involves user interface controls for managing content attributes. Per the patent, a computer-implemented method includes displaying a content item having at least one attribute that is changeable in value, maintaining a history of image states, each image state in the history corresponding to a change in at least one attribute value relative to another image state, and based on the maintained history of image states, generating multiple modified image states such that a quantity of modified image states is different from a quantity of image states in the maintained history. Nikhil Bhatt and Blake Seely are the inventors.

Patent number 8077218 is for methods and apparatuses for image processing. Per the patent, in one aspect, a method to generate a low dynamic range image from a high dynamic range image, includes: determining one or more regions of the high dynamic range image containing pixels having values that are outside a first range and inside a second range; computing a weight distribution from the one or more regions; and generating the low dynamic range image from the high dynamic range image using the weight distribution.

In another aspect, a method of image processing, includes: detecting one or more regions in a first image of a high dynamic range scene according to a threshold to generate a mask; and blending the first image and a second image of the scene to generate a third image using the mask. The inventors are Gabriel G. Marcu and Steve Swen.

Patent number 8078800 involves dynamic operating point modification in an integrated circuit. Per the patents, in one embodiment, an integrated circuit includes a processor, an internal memory, and a memory controller coupled to an external memory. The integrated circuit may support two or more modes of operation, with different operating points. To switch from one operating point to another, code executed by the processor may copy switch code from the external memory into the internal memory, and may jump to the switch code.

Executing out of the internal memory, the switch code may communicate with the memory controller to cause the external memory to enter into self-refresh mode. The operating point may be altered, and the switch code may reinitialize the memory controller after the integrated circuit has stabilized at the new operating point. After the memory controller's physical interface circuit has relocked, the external memory may exit self-refresh mode. The inventors are Maziar H. Moallem, Sanjay Mansingh and Richard F. Avra.

Apple has also been granted design patents for the Apple TV, the iPod classic and second generation iPod nano.

-- Dennis Sellers