Product specifications

VT8237R Data Sheet
Revision 2.06 December 15, 2004 -4- Overview
OVERVIEW
The VT8237R South Bridge is a high integration, high performance, power-efficient, and high compatibility device that supports
Intel and non-Intel based processor to V-Link bus bridge functionality to make a complete Microsoft PC2001-compliant PCI/LPC
system. The VT8237R includes standard intelligent peripheral controllers:
a) Serial ATA dual channel controller with RAID capability.
b) Master mode enhanced IDE controller with dual channel DMA engine and interlaced dual channel commands. Dedicated
FIFO coupled with scatter and gather master mode operation allows high performance transfers between PCI and IDE
devices. In addition to standard PIO and DMA mode operation, the VT8237R also supports the UltraDMA-133, 100, 66, and
33 standards to allow reliable data transfer at rates up to 133 MB/sec. The IDE controller is SFF-8038i v1.0 and Microsoft
Windows-family compliant.
c) IEEE 802.3 compliant 10 / 100 Mbps PCI bus master Ethernet MAC with standard MII interface to external PHYceiver.
d) Universal Serial Bus controller that is USB v2.0 / 1.1 and Universal HCI v2.0 / 1.1 compliant. The VT8237R includes four
root hubs with eight function ports with integrated physical layer transceivers. The USB controller allows hot plug and play
and isochronous peripherals to be inserted into the system with universal driver support. The controller also implements
legacy keyboard and mouse support so legacy software can run transparently in a non-USB-aware OS environment.
e) Integrated bus-mastering dual full-duplex direct-sound AC97-link-compatible sound system.
f) Full System Management Bus (SMBus) interface.
g) Keyboard controller with PS2 mouse support.
h) Real Time Clock with 256 byte extended CMOS. In addition to the standard ISA RTC functionality, the integrated RTC also
includes the date alarm, century field, and other enhancements for compatibility with the ACPI standard.
i) Notebook-class power management functionality compliant with ACPI and legacy APM requirements. Multiple sleep states
(power-on suspend, suspend-to-DRAM, and suspend-to-Disk) are supported with hardware automatic wake-up. Additional
functionality includes event monitoring, CPU clock throttling and stop (Intel processor protocol), PCI bus clock stop control,
modular power, clock and leakage control, hardware-based and software-based event handling, general purpose I/O, chip
select and external SMI.
j) Plug and Play controller that allows complete steerability of all PCI interrupts and internal interrupts / DMA channels to any
interrupt channel. One additional steerable interrupt channel is provided to allow plug and play and reconfigurability of on-
board peripherals for Windows family compliance.
CPU
HA
MD
MA/Command
HD
North Bridge
539 BGA
VT8237R
System Memory
Sideband Signals:
Init / A20M#
INTR / NMI
SMI / StopClk
FERR / IGNNE
Sleep
USB 2.0 Ports 0-7
PCI
LPC
RTC
Crystal
Boot ROM
Expansion
Cards
IDE Primary and Secondary
Serial ATA Ports 1 and 2
AC97 Link
GPIO, Power Control, Reset
Keyboard / Mouse
SMB
DIMM Module ID
Onboard
LPC I/O
MII Fast Ethernet Interface
API
C
V-Lin
k
Interfac
e
Figure 1. PC System Configuration Using the VT8237R