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Com (hardware Interface)




Most PC-compatible systems in the 1980s and 1990s had one or two ports, with communication interfaces defined like this:

  • COM1: I/O Port 0x3F8, IRQ 4

  • COM2: I/O port 0x2F8, IRQ 3

  • COM3: I/O port 0x3E8, IRQ 4

  • COM4: I/O port 0x2E8, IRQ 3


As of 2007 , most systems ship with one or no physical COM ports.


I/O ADDRESSES

The COM ports are interfaced by an integrated circuit such as 16550 UART . This IC has seven internal 8-bit Registers which hold information and configuration data about which data is to be sent or was received, the Baud Rate , interrupt configuration and more. In the case of COM1, these registers can be accessed by writing to or reading from the I/O Address es 0x3F8 to 0x3FF.

If the CPU, for example, wants to send information out on COM1, it writes to I/O port 0x3F8, as this I/O port is "connected" to the UART IC register which holds the information that is to be sent out.


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