ADLINK cPCI-3538 - Manual (Page 9)

Introduction
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Introduction
1.1 About the Serial Communication Modules
The serial communication modules are intelligent serial input/output
multi-port controller cards, which go with the new generation of PC
platform CompactPCI. The modules can reduce the frequency 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 frequency of
interrupt and increase the non-interrupt task’s interval.
The serial communication interface series use ASIC PCI controller to
interface the module to cPCI bus. The ASIC fully implement the PCI local
bus specification Rev. 2.1. All related bus 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.