User`s guide

Aironet Wireless Communications, Inc. 4-1 Confidential and Proprietary

CHAPTER 4 A

PCMCIA Hardware Interface Operation

This chapter details the hardware aspects of the PC4500/4800 PCMCIA host interface. See Chapter 7 for

details about the PCMCIA software interface.

PCMCIA Hardware

The PC4500/4800 PCMCIA interface is compliant to the PCMCIA PC Card standard electrical and

physical specifications and fully supports 8 and 16 bit transfers. The tables below summarize the

interface signals. For complete descriptions, see the PCMCIA PC Card standard. This interface provides

access to attribute memory (CIS configuration data) and I/O memory (host registers).

Access to the MAC controller registers and shared memory is via 32 (16-bit) registers mapped into the

host I/O space. The PC4500/4800 also requires a host interrupt for interrupt driven buffer processing.

The provision of these resources is typically performed with the interaction of card and socket services

and the host-side device driver.

For more complete information about the PCMCIA electrical interface, see the PCMCIA PC Card

standard.

See Appendix C for descriptions about several utility programs provided on the OEM Developer disk

which are useful for debugging the PC4500/4800 operation. These utilities allow the user to switch the

PC4500/4800 operation between PCMCIA, ISA, and Serial modes, upgrade the PC4500/4800 firmware,

and perform routine diagnostics.