ISBC 546 Board Description
- The iSBC board is a terminal and line printer controller for the Intel system 320. The board communicates with a MULTIBUS host as a slave board.
- The ISBC 546 uses an Intel 80186 microprocessor, operating at 8 MHz as its CPU. The 80186 controls four serial channels, sending data to or receiving data form the MULTIBUS host, and a line printer interface. The on-board 80186 gains the attention of the MULTIBUS host by generating an interrupt over the MULTIBUS interface to the host. A flag byte mechanism allows the MULTIBUS host to interrupt the board, to reverse the board, or to reset an interrupt to the MULTIBUS host generated by the board.
- The four serial interfaces on the ISBC 546 board are through four 9-pin connectors. The 9-pin connections are fully compatible with the IBM PCAT connections.
- The line printer interface is compatible with the IBM line printer interface.
- The iSBC 546 board has two on-board 82530 Serial Communications Controllers (SCC). Each 82530 SCC contains two on-chip baud generators, allowing each channel to be independently programmed for separate baud rates. The maximum transfer rate per channel per channel is 19.2 baud.
- The iSBC board has four 64Kx4 DRAM (Dynamic RAM) devices, a total of 128 kbytes per board. The upper 32K bytes can be addressed by other MULTIBUS boards.
- The board also includes two 28-pin sockets. These sockets are populated with firmware EPROMs.
- A clock/calendar circuit, on the iSBC 546 is backed up by a non-rechargeable battery which keeps the clock/calendar operating for six months with all other power off.
