Is it possible to get 16 UART port, with 460.8K or 115.2K baud rates, from a PCI2.0 Bus? The PCI Bus is from a Hitachi SH4 microprocessor and the OS is WinCE3.0.

I intend to connect around 16 serial devices, with baud rates of 4.8K, 9.8K, 115.2K to 460.8K max.

What could be the right chipset for such problem?

 

Not sure, these guys have a card that might work, give them a call:

"www.ieci.com.au/products/Product_Page2.asp?Product_ID=475":http://www.ieci.com.au/products/Product_Page2.asp?Product_ID=475

And of course these guys:

"www.digi.com/solutions/mportserialcards/apxp.shtml":http://www.digi.com/solutions/mportserialcards/apxp.shtml

John

 

Probably not if you intend for your processor to do anything else that's useful. And it has little to do with the PCI bus. Typical UARTS buffer only a couple of characters before generating an interrupt and 16 at the speeds you mention would generate vast numbers of interrupts which Windows of any ilk, even CE, is simply not going to handle. This is by inspection, but I don't think I need to do the math. Far better would be to use an efficient multiport board with dedicated coprocessors such as a Rocketport or other "intelligent" PCI multiport board. This would require drivers which may be an issue for CE on a SH4, but it would give you a fighting chance.

Then there is the problem of what you intend to do with the data. This may or may not be an issue depending on port activity but would certainly pull CE out of any sort of realtime response if all ports need to handle 460.8k and the cpu is handling the data as opposed to DMA in and out of core. To answer much further would require a little more info about what you need to do with the data and a realistic assessment of actual throughput. The lower speeds should be little problem even continuously while the upper speeds would be fairly optimistic unless the duty cycle can be lowered.

Regards
cww