Western Digital Corp with the help of its Faraday Electronics and Paradise Systems Inc subsidiaries has come up with a string of high integration, surface mounted products to enable third parties to develop IBM PS/2 add-on boards – or go a long way to cloning the machines. They range from core logic chips to disk controllers, communications and graphics chips. For those working specifically on the 80286-based Model 50 and 60 designs, Western Digital has the 20MHz CMOS FE5400 core logic chip set and four associated devices. These are claimed to reduce sur-face mounting requirements by 60%. The FE5000 CPU peripheral and control logic device provides basic system logic, interrupt control, co-pro-cessor interface, and programmable timer functions. The FE5010 direct memory access and Micro Channel control device contains system DMA con-trollers, virtual mode extension logic, arbitration control, Micro Channel timing circuitry, system clock generation, wait state logic and sys-tem bus control. In addition, the FE5010, in conjunction with the FE5030 memory control device will support advanced memory configurations such as the Lotus-Intel-Microsoft defined Extended Memory Specification. The FE5020 completes the chip set and provides address and data buffers, along with requisite control logic using low-power, high drive technology. Western Digital has also announced a number of add-in boards for the PS/2 models 50, 60 and 80, including an ST506 Winchester controller, an ESDI Winchester controller, and an SCSI adaptor. Starlan and Ethernet adaptors are available for the whole range. A single chip floppy disk drive interface, the WD57C65, for the models 25, 30, 50 and 60 and a dual channel, asynchronous communications element, the WD16C552, for the old IBM PC-DOS range and for the PS/2 have also been announced. The WD16C552 serves two serial input-output interfaces simultaneously and one fully bi-directional parallel data port. Among its features are two serial I/O interfaces that perform serial-to-parallel conversion on data characters received from peripheral devices or modems. Designed to work with the PVGA1 IBM VGA-compatible chip (CI No 782) to optimise the video subsystem performance is the PCLK1 video graphics array clock generator which is capable of producing different output frequencies dynamically under firmware control. For those working just on PS/2 model 25 and 30, Western Digital is offering the FE2011 which integrates the functions of the PS/2 Model 30 CPU core logic into a single chip. Western Digital claims that the chip is fully compatible with the Model 30 at the regis-ter level and that it gives a 25% performance improvement over the Mod-els 25 and 30. The company has also introduced the WDPS25/20i 21Mb int-ernal hard disk kit for upgrading the Personal System/2 Model 25, and 32Mb FileCard PS/2 Model 30 Run Length Limited drive/control assembly.
Content from our partners
