Interface to 16bit PCMCIA

Hello,

Does anyone know of any good resources for interfacing to a 16 bit PCMCIA
card from a microcontroller can be found? Or has anyone done this and can
lend some advice? Assuming I have enought IO from my controller would this
be a difficult undertaking besides the fact of software to control whatever
device I wish to talk to?.

Thanks
Josiah

It's not actually that bad. The worst part is parsing the "tuples" in order
to identify the device, determine resource requirements, and allocate
appropriate resources. From a PC-interface standpoint, resources means
IO-address range, memory address range, IRQ, DMA, etc.

In the case of a generic card inserted by a user, your micro would have to
connect to all required IO & control lines, and drive them appropriately.
You would have to read the tuples from the configuration space of the card,
determine what it's resource requirements are, and allocate them. You then
communicate with application-specific functions of the card via the
resources you have specified.

In the more restricted environment you are probably dealing with, you may
want to develop some code to map and parse tuples anyway, since you may find
that different manufacturers of "widget X" don't have the same resource
requirements, so automatic configuration is preferred over hard-coding the
settings required for ACME Corp's widget X.

You will, of course, need access to the PCMCIA specification, or other
detailed development info.

Good Luck
Robb.

"cpex" <cpex@NOSPAMmyrealbox.com> wrote in message
news:481jc.4473$IO6.4434@twister.socal.rr.com...
> Hello,
>
> Does anyone know of any good resources for interfacing to a 16 bit PCMCIA
> card from a microcontroller can be found? Or has anyone done this and can
> lend some advice? Assuming I have enought IO from my controller would this
> be a difficult undertaking besides the fact of software to control
whatever
> device I wish to talk to?.
>
> Thanks
> Josiah
>
>