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Date:      Thu, 24 Aug 1995 14:50:26 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
To:        rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com (Rodney W. Grimes)
Cc:        fenner@parc.xerox.com, terryl@cs.stanford.edu, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: ISDN Anyone?
Message-ID:  <199508241950.OAA20237@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
In-Reply-To: <199508241906.MAA08345@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> from "Rodney W. Grimes" at Aug 24, 95 12:06:05 pm

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Hi Rod,

> Carefull here, many Uarts are only rated for on f(max) of 5Mhz, others
> are good to 8Mhz.  I think all 16550AFN's are rated for 8MHz, but not
> sure if they still had the -5/-8 speed option that late in the game.

This is something to consider.  However I am talking out of a NS data book
and the only references I have seen are:

NS16450/16C450/	 3.1 MHz max, 56k "top" baud rate suggested
INS8250A/
INS82C50A
INS8250/	 3.1 MHz max, 56k "top" baud rate suggested
INS8250-B
NS16550AF	 8.0 MHz max, 256k "top" baud rate suggested
NS16C451	24.0 MHz max, no suggested top  :-)
NS16C551	24.0 MHz max, 1.5M "top" baud rate suggested

Now if I am reading this right the INS8250-B is a slower speed part, judging
from the electrical characteristics.  I do not see any lower-speed offerings
on the other parts.  Although it IS funny that the 16C451 can have a 24 MHz
clock and they didn't bother to list a top rate, I can imagine that you
could get pretty busy trying to shove a million bits per second through a
device without any real FIFO.

> Watch the capacitance on that shielded cable, the higher the pf/foot the
> shorter it needs to be.  If you use high quality, low loss, low capacitance
> individually shielded twisted pair data cable grounded one side of each
> pair for the TX and RX (yea, okay, so you need a few more wires :-) you can
> run 230KB quite a distance.  A scope comes in pretty handy to see your
> signal quality and the receiver as well.

Or if you are only going 2 feet like I usually do.  :-)

Anyways the moral of the story is:  don't try to hot rod a non-FIFO chip or
you may torch the sucker.  (heck, you may even torch a FIFO chip, there are
no guarantees... if you can't afford to lose the UART don't play with fire).

And of course if you're using non-NS parts (i.e. Startech, etc) you might
want to check the specs.  Inferior chips made for the PC market and all...
I've run Startech at 2x without problems.

... Joe

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - Systems Administrator			      jgreco@ns.sol.net
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI			   414/342-4847



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