PMC421 Abaco Systems 8-Port Serial Connector

The GE Fanuc / Ramix PMC421 8-Port Serial Connector provides a uniquely effective solution for integrating serial I/O requirements into a VMEbus or CompactPCI system. Implemented on a single PMC card, the PMC421 is fully compatible with current generation VMEbus and CPCI Single Board Computers, as well as any special purpose processor that includes a PMC connector. In addition, card edge PCI systems can be accommodated using RAMiX's PMC239 adapter for rapid prototype and development.

Traditional single and multi-port Serial Interfaces place a high overhead on the host processor by requiring per-character-attention (i.e., each received and transmitted character generates interrupts and programmed I/O from the host). Two features of the PMC421 remove this overhead: On-card CPU for character blocking/unblocking and Deep FIFO buffers to avoid data overrun (128 Bytes on each port) plus 4MB. Direct control of the 8 Serial Ports (UART) is provided by the on-board processor, a 32-bit RISC CPU. This processor includes DMA engines for efficient transfers over the PCI (over 100Mbytes/second). Data is buffered in the on-card DRAM between transfer to/from the UART interface. In addition to off-loading basic character manipulation, special data handling routines can readily be added to the local processor. Examples include encryption/description, special protocol handling, error correction, etc.