Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Description
The intelligent PCI-1625U 8-port RS-232 interface card was designed for lab and industrial applications where a PC needs to communicate with terminals, modems, or other instruments. You can install up to four PCI- 1625U cards for a total of 32 ports in any PCI bus-based PC.
PCI-1625U is virtually a self contained computer. The PCI-1625U card has an onboard DSP processor that takes over the processing load from the host PC. When you are transferring large amounts of data from multi- ple ports, servicing the interrupts alone consumes a large percentage of the capacity of your computer's CPU. PCI-1625U serves as a high speed, dedicated interrupt processor.
The processor also has 1 MB of SRAM which can store serial data and reduce host CPU loading effectively. When PCI-1625U initializes, it downloads the driver software (which functions like a PC's BIOS) into its onboard DSP. This improves performance and makes version upgrading easy so there is no hardware redundancy.
PCI-1625U has a universal PCI connector that is compatible with both newer 3.3 V signaling systems and the traditional 5V signaling system. This gives high compatibility and allows usage in diverse systems.
Besides, Advantech provides a convenient utility program, ICOM Tools, to help users test the PCI card performance by analyzing a port’s status. It’s easy to use the menu commands and toolbar buttons. ICOM Tools acts as a PC-based data scope that lets you set a trigger condition, capture the communication data and monitor the signal status. ICOM Tools is applicable to all series of Advantech ICOM cards.
PCI-1625U also has many accessories to make usage more convenient. You can use OPT8AP,OPT8ASP,OPT8BP,OPT8BSP, extending module boxes to access 8-port RS-232 devices, or OPT8C and OPT8H, extending cable to access 8-port RS-232 devices, modems and terminals with any kinds of DTE and DCE connection. You could also use OPT8FP to access 8-port RS-422 device, OPT8FP is the RS-422 and RS232 con- verter connection box.
