SL1000                           serial card/STEbus systems
Six Serial Ports on One STEbus Card
 
Microbytes Daily News Service
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
DSP designed its new SL1000 six-channel dedicated serial card to
enhance the communications capability of STEbus systems. Based on
the Z80 code-compatible HD64180 processor, the board features
four serial ports plus two optional asynchronous serial ports.
 
The card contains two Zilog Z8530 serial communications chips
and, for synchronous operation, two clock inputs and a clock
output for each channel. You can use the two asynchronous serial
ports incorporated in the HD64180 chip to provide transmit and
receive data and CTS signals.
 
You can include any number of the cards in an STEbus system
since part of the HD64180's RAM is dualported and appears as a
16K-byte block in the STEbus memory-address space. This
facilitates the transfer of data, code, and status information
between the slave cards and the STEbus master.
 
Two options are available for providing the SL1000 with its
operating program. One option uses no EPROM since the bus master
downloads the code through the dual-port memory, and the second
option uses an EPROM to contain some or all of the code.
 
The STEbus can reset the HD64180 processor, as well as send
maskable and nonmaskable interrupts to it; the processor can also
interrupt the bus.
 
Price: L285.
 
Contact: DSP Design Ltd., Unit 1, Apollo Studios, Charlton Kings
Rd., London NW5 2SB, UK, 44-01-482-1773.
 
                              --- Martha Hicks
 
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