Automotive Mobile Audio Video

Semiconductors today announced the release of the industry's most advanced 4-channel UART, the SC28L194.

Fabricated in Philips' low cost, high-density CMOS-LSI technology, the SC28L194 interfaces to both Motorola 68000 and Intel 80X microcontrollers and boasts several feature enhancements that make it a more flexible and reliable solution for high-end communications devices like statistical multiplexers, data concentrators, automotive, cab and engine controls, entertainment systems, MIDI control for electronic music systems and terminal servers.

The single chip communications device saves board space by supporting 4 full-duplex asynchronous channels, each with its own 16-byte receive and 16-byte transmit FIFO. The depth of the FIFOs significantly improves system performance by reducing the likelihood that data will be lost.

An intelligent interrupt system minimizes interrupt overhead by reporting the context of interrupts directly to the processor. This unburdens the processor since it doesn't have to interrogate the device to find out the type of interrupting device, its channel number, or the fill level of the FIFO.

The superior character recognition capability includes additional logic for Xon/Xoff flow control. While programming the Xon/Xoff characters is usually done individually, commands have been added to the SC28L194 that permit the programmer to write to all the registers in one operation.

"The depth of the FIFOs and the intelligent interrupt system make this one of the most advanced 4-channel UARTs on the market today," said Fred Kamp, network product marketing manager at Philips. "There is less chance of dropping information during transmission with this Quad UART because of its superior character recognition capability and its advanced interrupt system."

Operating speeds for receivers and transmitters can be selected from 24 standard fixed baud rates ranging from 50 bps to 230 Kbps, or they may be programmed up to the maximum 1 Mbps, making it attractive for dual speed, full-duplex channel applications such as clustered terminal solutions.