C H A P T E R 1

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of SunSAI/P board, including:

Shipping Kit Contents

Product Description

Features

Customer Assistance

Shipping Kit Contents

The carton in which your SunSAI/P board was shipped should contain the following items:

SunSAI/P board

SunSAI/P User's Guide

One or more software packets containing the device driver CD-ROM

Connector assembly

Product Description

The SunSAI/P board is a multi-channel intelligent Serial Asynchronous Interface board for computers incorporating the PCI bus standard.

The heart of the SunSAI/P board is a 32-bit RISC processor. The board has 128 KB of dual-ported high-speed RAM used for program code and data buffering. The SunSAI/P board supports "preset" throughput speeds of up to 115K bps for each asynchronous port.

The processor and dual-ported RAM relieves your computer of the burden of managing the serial ports. The computer can transfer large blocks of data directly to the memory on the board, then move on to other tasks while the board sends the data out the serial ports one character at a time. Similarly, the board receives input data and stores it in buffers in its dual-ported RAM, so the computer only needs to check periodically to see if data is available.

The dual-ported RAM is memory that is accessible for read and write operations by both the board and the computer. To the computer, the dual-ported RAM looks exactly like its own memory and can be accessed by the same high-speed memory referencing commands the computer uses for its internal memory. This means that a block of data that may take a number of seconds for the SunSAI/P board to receive or transmit to the outside world can be transferred between the board and the computer in mere microseconds.

The SunSAI/P board's dual-ported RAM is mapped into a 4 Mbyte unused area in the host computer's memory address space.

Features

The SunSAI/P board has the following features:

Serial asynchronous board with eight ports

Maximum speed 115K bps per port

Meets PCI local bus specification rev. 2.1

PCI card: 32-bit data width, short length with 33 MHz operating frequency and 5.0 or 3.3 volts I/O signalling (universal card)

Customer Assistance

Be sure to read the Release Notes, if they are included with this software. The Release Notes contain late-breaking information.

For assistance in the United States, please call 1-800-USA-4SUN.

For information on how to get the latest patches and patch revisions, please visit the SunSolve^sm website at http://sunsolve.sun.com, or contact your local Sun Service provider. For additional information, access Sun on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com.