Local bus or parallel port bridged to PCI in reconfigurable chip

A chip that can be reconfigured by the user to provide a PCI to 8-bit pass through Local Bus or Centronics compliant parallel port has been introduced by Oxford Semiconductor. For legacy applications, the PCI resources are arranged so that the parallel port can be located at standard I/O addresses.

Designed for parallel expansion cards or Local Bus bridges, the new device is compliant with the latest PCI Bus and Power Management specifications.

Using the 8-bit pass-through Local Bus facilitates the expansion of serial cards. It provides a bi-directional 8-bit data bus, an 8-bit address bus, four chip-selects and 2 multi-purpose IO lines that can be programmed to generate interrupts. The 8-bit Local Bus supports 4 to 256 bytes of IO and 4K of memory address space. The parallel port, which can be enabled in place of the Local bus, conforms to IEEE 1284 SPP/EPP/ECP specifications.

Oxford Semiconductor has also developed example device drivers for Windows 95/98 and NT serial applications. The OX9162 is a 5.0V device in a 128 pin TQFP package. It costs 5 USD in 10000+ quantities. Samples are available now and production quantities will be shipping in May 2000.