ADLINK C514 - Manual (Page 7)

Introduction
• 1
1
Introduction
1.1 About the Serial Communication Cards
•
The serial communication cards are intelligent serial input/output
multi-port controller cards which are suitable to PC AT with PCI bus
machine. The cards can reduce the interval for serial
communication controller to interrupt main CPU on the mainboard
to improve the whole system performance.
•
Traditionally, the serial communication controller will interrupt the
MPU character by character. This action will waste MPU processing
time and drop the system computing power. If the MPU is
processing some non-interrupted task, then the serial controller will
overrun and data lost.
•
The serial communication interface series can support buffer
capability or local processor and dual port RAM in each port’s
transmit and receive channel simultaneously. This capability will
reduce the number of interrupt and increase the non-interrupt task’s
interval.
•
The serial communication interface series used ASIC PCI controller
to interface the board to PCI bus. The ASIC fully implement the PCI
local bus specification Rev. 2.1. All bus relative configurations, such
as base memory address and interrupt assignment, are
automatically controlled by BIOS software. It does not need any
user interaction and pre-study for the configurations. This removes
the burden of searching for a conflict-free configuration.