
W83877AF
WINBOND I/O
Publication Release Date: Dec. 1996
Preliminary Version 0.52
- 1 -
GENERAL DESCRIPTION
The W83877AF is an enhanced version from Winbond's most popular I/O chip W83877F --- which
integrates the disk drive adapter, serial port (UART), IrDA 1.0 SIR, parallel port, IDE interface,
configurable plug-and-play registers for the whole chip --- adding powerful features: IrDA 1.1 (MIR for
1.152M bps or FIR for 4M bps), TV remote IR. In addition to the function enhancement, W83877AF
is pin-to-pin compatible to W83877F.
The disk drive adapter functions of the W83877AF include a floppy disk drive controller compatible
with the industry standard 82077/ 765, data separator, write pre-compensation circuit, decode logic,
data rate selection, clock generator, drive interface control logic, interrupt and DMA logic. The wide
range of functions integrated onto the W83877AF greatly reduces the number of components
required for interfacing with floppy disk drives. The W83877AF supports up to 4 Three-mode Floppy
Disk Drives (FDD) of formats 360K, 720K, 1.2M, 1.44M, or 2.88M, and data transfer rates of 250
Kb/s, 300 Kb/s, 500 Kb/s,1 Mb/s, and 2 Mb/s.
The W83877AF provides two high-speed serial communication ports (UARTs), one of which supports
serial Infrared communication. Each UART includes a 16-byte send/receive FIFO, a programmable
baud rate generator, complete modem control capability, and a processor interrupt system. One of
UART supports infrared (IR) includes 32-byte FIFO, serial IR (115,200 bps), MIR (1.152M bps or
0.576M bps), FIR (4M bps), and TV remote IR (supported NEC, RC-5, extended RC-5, and RECS-80
protocols).
The W83877AF supports one PC-compatible printer port (SPP), bi-directional Printer Port (BPP), and
also Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP) and Extended Capabilities Port (ECP). Through the printer port
interface pins, also available are: Extension FDD Mode and Extension 2FDD Mode allowing one or
two external floppy disk drives to be attached. Especially in the application of notebook computer,
this feature is very useful.
The Extension Adapter Mode of the W83877AF also allows pocket devices to be installed through the
printer interface pins in notebook computer applications according to a protocol set by Winbond, but
with upgraded performance. The JOYSTICK mode allows a joystick to be connected to a parallel port
with a signal switching cable.
The W83877AF supports two embedded hard disk drive (IDE AT bus) interfaces and a game port with
decoded read/write output.
The configuration registers support mode selection, function enable/disable, and power down function
selection. Moreover, the configurable PnP registers are compatible with the plug-and-play feature in
Windows 95
TM
, which makes system resource allocation more efficient than ever.