PCL-858+ (ADVANTECH)

PCL-858 series interface cards provide eight RS-232 serial communication ports. Each port can be configured individually using on-board jumpers. PCL-858A/858B cards each have two 16C554 UARTs, which make serial I/O more reliable. The higher performance PCL858+ has two 16C654 UARTs. By buffering data into 64-byte packets before putting it on the bus, UARTs drastically reduce the CPU load. This makes the PCL-858+ especially suitable for high- speed serial I/O applications under multitasking environments and for applications involving high data rates. PCL-858 series cards support automatic addressing for all eight ports. All channels share the same interrupt (IRQ), and an interrupt status register can be used to determine the interrupt source. When an on-board interrupt occurs the interrupt status register (vector address) indicates which port generated it. The shared interrupt can be set to most common (extended) AT interrupts. This simplifies programming, speeds up interrupt processing and frees up interrupts for other devices. Each card comes with DOS drivers, a serial communication library called PC-ComLIB, and a Windows 95/98/NT configuration utility. The PC-ComLIB package also includes the DataScope data viewer and terminal emulator with self-diagnostics utilities for easy troubleshooting and debugging.