Off-Loading the Host Computer Through Flexible DMA Interface

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1988 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, NevadaAs data rates and system throughput requirements continue to increase, more and more attention must be given to ways of off-loading the host computer by shifting tasks to the front-end preprocessing subsystem. In addition to some of the more common tasks like data compression and EU conversion already performed in the front end, there is the time consuming task of organizing telemetry data. Once relieved from this secondary task the host can solely attend to its primary task of application processing. This paper describes an intelligent DMA interface (CPI007) which permits the automatic building of various types of array buffers in the host computer. This flexible high-speed device uses an EPROM based, bit slice microengine utilizing parameters stored in its operational store RAM during setup to build the array buffers. The interface is implemented on a single module in the front-end preprocessing subsystem and was developed for those mainframe computers that can be configured to accept address/data inputs for DMA to system memory (e.g. Gould Sel, DEC). With this type of architecture, algorithms may easily be written to accommodate a wide variety of data organization and transfer requirements. Along with the technical description of this device, actual data array buffering problems and solutions will also be addressed in this paper.International Foundation for TelemeteringProceedings from the International Telemetering Conference are made available by the International Foundation for Telemetering and the University of Arizona Libraries. Visit http://www.telemetry.org/index.php/contact-us if you have questions about items in this collection