What is Super I / O ?

Circuit synthesis Super I / O is connected to south bridge chipset in a motherboard diagram chuSuper I / O is an integrated chip on the motherboard functions mediated communication between the south bridge chipset and interfaces periphery. Super I / O is often seen on the previous motherboard. The chip Super I / O is often used for communication with peripheral devices have low bandwidth.

Super I / O often provide at least the following functions:

The controller of the floppy drive (floppy controller)
Controller for one or two serial ports (serial port controller)
The controller for the parallel port (parallel port controller)
The actual chip Super I / O expansion also integrated other features, such a chip Super I / O is the symbol of SMC LPC47M102 on the motherboard's ATX Intel VC820 can integrate out three features as above has added the following features:



A multi-style parallel port: ECP / EPP
The interface for keyboard and mouse controller (the chip Super I / O Old does not support this interface)
The chip Super I / O is often used before the classic ISA bus, in the next generation than we move to higher bus speeds than the PLC, with clock operations by half compared to the PCI bus, ie in speed: 16.67 MBps. Such use will be more effective PLC bus ISA bus (by the other hand, the PC99 standard ISA bus structure will disappear in the personal computer).

Super I / O also controls the interface to control devices on the computer game (joystick), the infrared communication. They can be integrated more functions by integrating more and more features will help to reduce the components and integrated circuits on the motherboard, and this greatly reduces production costs for boards aorta or overall for the computer in general. The previous generation of computers often need to use separate boards for this type of communication.

With a general trend is integrated into the southbridge chipset and chip Super I / O should be more and more motherboards are compact by not contain many components to serve a minimum of communication directly on board aorta as well. The general trend in design today is integrating all the south bridge chipset. Even some manufacturers such as SiS hardware components, nVIDIA today in some of their products also integrate all the chipset north bridge, south bridge chipset and super I / O on a single integrated single chip .