| Product Upgrade - link VME or CAMAC to a Personal Computer
5331 PCI Personality
card for the 1330/ 1331 PC-CAMAC Interfaces
and 3330/3331 PC-VME Interfaces.
The 5331 is a dual-purpose
PCI personality card for the popular 1330/ 1331 ISA PC-CAMAC and 3330/3331
PC-VME interfaces. It has been designed using the PLX9052
second-generation PCI-to-legacy bus interface chip. This has an
easy-to-use local bus which can easily be adapted to an ‘ISA-like’
protocol resulting in minimum circuit conversion work. The interface
device is fully programmable with four separate slave images, multiplexed
or de-multiplexed target bus and variable local bus-width.
Clearly since the new card resides on the PCI bus, new software will be
required to drive it. Hytec are preparing a driver for Windows NT,
LABviews and CATY (Hytec's Programming Language) and it is hoped
that LINUX drivers will be available, possibly from a user site.
The use in the design of the
new PLX chip does offer a number of opportunities to improve the
performance of the personality card and it is hoped that some of them will
be used:
The 9052 chip is ‘told’
what the target data bus width is through its configuration registers. We
intend to re-position the command and data registers of the two
controllers to allow single long-word transfers of command and CAMAC data
values. Typically, this would involve moving the three byte-wide data
registers onto consecutive byte boundaries and moving the command
registers similarly, to start on a long-word boundary. What the PLX chip
does is to split the data up into bytes and this means that single
long-word accesses will pass all three data bytes or all three command
bytes (N, A and F).
Here is a comparison of the
two structures to illustrate the idea:
|
Register |
ISA
address (H) |
PCI
Address |
New mode |
| |
|
|
|
|
Function
code |
28A |
(C106) |
) Single |
|
Station
No. |
288 |
(C105) |
)
long-word |
|
Subaddress |
286 |
C104 |
) access. |
| |
|
|
) |
|
Data high |
284 |
(C102) |
) Single |
|
Data mid |
282 |
(C101) |
)
long-word |
|
Data low |
280 |
C100 |
) access |
A single CAMAC write can now
be achieved with a long-word write of 24-bits of data, followed by a
long-word write at offset 4 with the subaddress, station number and
function code in ascending bytes. You can still, of course, write or read
bytes or words at any offset. The interface chip handles that by producing
lower address lines for you.
Another interesting feature
of the chip is that it has FIFOs in both directions and ‘pre-fetch’.
What this will mean is that it should be possible to set up 16-bit
auto-repeat mode and have the personality card hardware doing 16-bit reads
from a 1331, packing them into long words and putting them into the FIFO
for the PC to read out in a burst.
The same PCB will be
used with different connectors to link to either the 1330/1331.
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Email : sales@hytec-electronics.co.uk |
Copyright © 2000
[Hytec Electronics Ltd]. All rights reserved.
Information in this document is subject to change without notice.
Other products and companies referred to herein are trademarks or
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Our policy is one of continuous product development and the right is
reserved to supply equipment which may vary slightly from that described.
send mail to paul@hytec-electronics.co.uk
with questions or comments about this web site.
Last
modified:
July 29, 2005
|
