Oxford Semiconductor added a controller to its line of connectivity solutions. Combining eight Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitters (UARTs) and a PCI compliant host interface in a single chip, the OX16PCI958 communications controller from Oxford Semiconductor provides designers with the means to simplify multi-port serial to PCI bus design. An alternative to many dual chip solutions, the OX16PCI958 is compliant with the PCI local bus specification 3.0 and PCI power management specification 1.1 and benefits PCI-based hardware applications, including POS equipment, industrial automation systems and remote servers. The device offers PCB space savings, and by supporting both 3.3V and 5.0V bus systems, this part enables the development of add-in cards with universal application appeal. Highly programmable, the controller offers deep FIFOs with tunable trigger levels, hardware out-of-band flow control and a clock prescaler enabling designers to optimize data flows and configure application specific data rates up to a maximum of 4.125Mega baud using a 16.5MHz clock. The OX16PCI958 is software compatible with industry standard 16C550 types and the UART ports are easily configured to suit the needs of RS232 and RS422 applications.

Oxford is supporting its UART/PCI bridge solution with drivers for Windows 98, 2000, XP and CE as well as Linux operating systems, an evaluation board and application note. The OX16PCI958 is priced at $15.50 USD in 10,000 piece quantities and is sampling now.