PC/104 I/O Coprocessor Module Offloads Host's Duties

Designed to relieve the host from performing rudimentary I/O operations, IOCP-74 also provides a fast front-end response demanded by many real-time systems. Using a Microchip PIC16C74 RISC processor to control on-board circuits and execute any application specific computations or logic operations, this board consolidates most requested peripherals into one module. Standard functions include analog and digital I/O, counter/timer, EEPROM and serial communications. All module data variables and parameters are stored in a RAM array which the host accesses through a simple 8-bit sequential FIFO interface. The circuits allow the exchange of relatively large blocks of data while occupying only eight host I/O locations.