ADLINK Technology cPCI-3938, Manual

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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 are with the new generation of PC
platform CompactPCI. The modules 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 module to Compact 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.