1-18 Technical Information
The BIOS often changes after the product release to provide enhanced features or bug
fixes. To acquire the latest BIOS release, the ROM is flashed electronically allowing the
BIOS update to occur without removing the ROM. See Section 2, Setup and Operation, for
BIOS upgrade procedures.
VGA Controller
The NeoMagic NM2160 is a PCI 64-bit Graphics Accelerator. The integrated programma-
ble linear address feature accelerates the graphics user interface (GUI) performance. The
controller also supports Hardware Multimedia and VESA interface standards. The control-
ler provides advanced power management that helps to minimize power usage in the fol-
lowing modes:
normal operation
Standby (sleep) mode
panel off power saving modes.
Parallel Interface
The PC87338VJG chip is a 100-pin Thin Quad Flat Plastic (TQFP) chip. The controller
changes 8-bit parallel data into serial data and writes the data to the diskette. Conversely,
the serial data is transmitted from the diskette into parallel data, where it remains until the
read operation takes place.
Additional PC87338VJG chip operations include:
ISA compatibility
low-power CMOS with enhanced power-down mode
Keyboard Controller
The keyboard controller (M38813E) supports a PS/2-style keyboard, mouse and password
security feature. Refer to Appendix A for keyboard interface connector pin assignments.
When data is written to the output buffer, the controller generates an interrupt, and requests
the CPU to receive the data. The controller automatically adds an even parity bit to the data
sent and waits for a response. The device must acknowledge that the data was successfully
received by sending a response to the controller for each byte of data received.