National ships single-chip I/O controllers for Pentium 4s

National Semiconductor Corp. has introduced the bus-based PC87372 and PC87373 I/O controllers that are designed to meet the needs of Intel Pentium 4 systems and integrate the required system control functions into a single 128-pin QFP, thereby saving up to 15 percent of board space.

Manufactured using the company's 0.185m CMOS process, the complement the company's ICH4 I/O controller hub device and includes control functions such as master reset generation, power supply good signals, power sequencing and control, interface voltage translation and isolation for the SMBus, as well as fan speed monitoring with alarms for slow running fans.

They also support legacy functions required for any PC system including an IEEE 1284-compliant parallel port and an 8042-type keyboard and mouse controller. The PC87372 has a single 16550-type serial port, while the PC87373 has two serial ports and integrates standard game and MIDI functions.

As with other SuperI/O devices, the controllers also contain a floppy disk controller that supports overrun and under run conditions during DMA transactions, do not lose data or status bytes, and are free of the NEC765A bug.

The PC87372 and PC87373, both in a 128-pin QFP, are available for sampling and are priced at $2.10 and $2.20, respectively, in 1,000-unit quantities.