Chip Adds IEEE 1284 Features To Peripheral Devices

The W91284PIC is an IEEE 1284 peripheral interface controller IC that enables OEMs to easily add a high-speed IEEE 1284 parallel interface to cameras, scanners, printers and other PC peripherals. The IEEE 1284 standard defines bi-directional communication between PCs and their peripherals with speeds of 1.5 Mbytes/s and higher.On the chip are all of the IEEE 1284 and 1284.3 protocols, including Device_ID for plug-and-play functionality. It provides hardware support for the various communication modes defined by the standard, whichinclude Nibble, Byte, ECP and EPP. Dual FIFOs are used to support burst rate matching between the peripheral and host. For easy implementation, the client interface to the peripheral is based on a simple microprocessor interface. Designers don’t need to know anything about the parallel port to gain maximum, compliant parallel port connectivity. The chip does provide some client registers to control basic functions.