Campbell, California-based Zilog Inc launched the the Z16C32, its second-generation integrated universal serial communications controller for linking terminals and computers for shared database access: it supports data rates of up to 20M-bytes per second, twice the transfer rate of the Z16C31, and offers improved data handling, reduced CPU overhead and lower cost; it features programmable HDLC flags between frames for easy processing of back-to-back frames and automatic handling of odd address aligned frames found in ISDN applications and 32-bit Cyclic Redundancy Checks required for future Frame Relay network applications; it contains dual 32-bit Direct Memory Access channels, each with independent 32-byte FIFO buffers; the 20Mbyte-per-second version is $8.50 for 1,000-up, a 16Mbps version costs $7 even.
