1-20 Technical Information
The ROM BIOS contains both the system and video BIOS. The system BIOS is located in
the upper portion of the device, video BIOS is located in the lower portion. System BIOS is
located between F000h-FFFFh.
The BIOS often changes after the product release to provide enhanced features or bug
fixes. To acquire the latest BIOS release, the ROM is flashed electronically allowing the
BIOS update to occur without removing the ROM. See Section 2, Setup and Operation, for
BIOS upgrade procedures.
VGA Controller
The Chips and Technologies 65550 integrates a flat panel CRT GUI accelerator and multi-
media engine. The controller provides advanced power management that helps to minimize
power usage in:
■
normal operation
■
Suspend mode
■
panel off power saving modes.
Parallel Interface
The PC87338VLJ chip is a 100-pin Thin Quad Flat Plastic (TQFP) chip. The controller
changes 8-bit parallel data into serial data and writes the data to the diskette. Conversely,
the serial data is transmitted from the diskette into parallel data, where it remains until the
read operation takes place.
Additional PC87338VLJ chip operations include:
■
ISA compatibility
■
low-power CMOS with enhanced power-down mode
Keyboard Controller
The keyboard controller (M38813E4HP) supports a PS/2-style keyboard, mouse and se-
curity features such as keyboard hot keys and password. Refer to Appendix A for keyboard
interface connector pin assignments.
When data is written to the output buffer, the controller generates an interrupt, and requests
the CPU to receive the data. The controller automatically adds an even parity bit to the data
sent and waits for a response. The device must acknowledge that the data was successfully
received by sending a response to the controller for each byte of data received.
PCMCIA Controller
The Texas Instruments PCI1130 controller interfaces with the PCI bus, PCMCIA card
socket and configuration registers to provide: