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Hardware functionality

The hardware consists of two parts connected by a up to ten meters cable allowing 32 bit wide differential data transfer. A PCI card (PCIADA) containing the PC site local bus logic (i.e. PCIbus target chip PLX9050, www.plxtech.com) and interfacing to the VMEbus compatible card VMEMM (VME Master Module) which may act as a system controller. The VMEMM contains the VIC68A chip (from Cypress, www.cypress.com) as the VME site local bus driver. Due to the choice of the PCIbus as the PC site local bus, all hardware parameters (like memory addresses, timeouts, interrupt line ...) can be configured dynamically during the boot process or afterwards by simply writing to the PCI configuration space. There are two additional memory spaces available to the driver, the registers of the PLX chip and those of the VIC68A. The driver will setup the two chips to an operable state during initialization, the user of the driver has only very limited access to this initial configuration, thus resulting in a always well defined state of the hardware.


next up previous
Next: Features Up: The interface Previous: The interface


Fri Jul 2 08:09:45 MEST 1999