I have an existing product, using an 8 MHz 12 cycle 8032, interfaced to
a ruggedized handheld PC via 232 at 9600.  We would like to shrink the
product and put it on a PCMCIA card.  What are some good products and
information resources to come up to speed on the serial->PCMCIA
replacement?  The 8032 code is written in C and could be fairly easily
ported to another processor, if there were an advantage in that.  There
is also an AVR on board, but it interfaces with the 8032, so I don't
think its a consideration in the switch.

Thanks,
Thad

On 2004-02-06, Thad Smith <t...@acm.org> wrote:

> What are some good products and
> information resources to come up to speed on the serial->PCMCIA
> replacement?

The PCMCIA bus is basically the same as ISA.  The fast and
dirty solution would be to put a 16x50 UART on the card so that
it looked like a normal PC serial port and then hook your 8032
to that serial port.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  I'm pretending I'm
                                  at               pulling in a TROUT! Am I
                               visi.com            doing it correctly??

"Thad Smith" <t...@acm.org> skrev i meddelandet
news:4...@acm.org...
> I have an existing product, using an 8 MHz 12 cycle 8032, interfaced to
> a ruggedized handheld PC via 232 at 9600.  We would like to shrink the
> product and put it on a PCMCIA card.  What are some good products and
> information resources to come up to speed on the serial->PCMCIA
> replacement?  The 8032 code is written in C and could be fairly easily
> ported to another processor, if there were an advantage in that.  There
> is also an AVR on board, but it interfaces with the 8032, so I don't
> think its a consideration in the switch.
>
> Thanks,
> Thad


Maybe switch the AVR/8032 to the AT94K FPSLIC AVR+FPGA
I have had customers doing PCCARD with FPSLIC; and it is quite a nice fit.

You can emulate the 16550 UART in the FPGA, should not be too hard.
The onchip DPRAM should be excellent as FIFOs for the 550.

There are chips with PCCARD interfaces + ARM, but you need quite high volume
for those.

-- 
Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson   u...@a-t-m-e-l.com
This is a personal view which may or may not be
share by my Employer Atmel Nordic AB

we also have old fashioned RS232 link to the new 
laptop generations what come without any COM / LPT
interfaces. There are 2 solutions:

1) USB using the chips from ftdichip.com

2) PCMCIA using the chips from oxsemi.co.uk

Oxsemi makes 16C550 compatible UART named OX16C950
and can be switched to diffent bus modes at reset.
This way you have a single chip solution with the
complex addressing modes of PCMCIA. 

Both attempts do not require writing own drivers
becouse they are free from the semi makers for 
most windows systems. Your application sees virtual
com port and dont need any changes. Of coarse in
case of PCMCIA you can add own eeprom with custom 
data and write own CIS