A DATA MAXIMIZING SERIAL TO PARALLEL BUS INTERFACE IN A DATA PROCESSING SYSTEM AND METHOD THEREFOR

摘要

A serial/parallel interface for interfacing the serial port of a microcontroller with parallel bus devices, and a protocol for communicating with the same. The interf ace operates to maximize through-put with minimum handshaking. When the bus device i s a nonvolatile memory containing the operating software of the microcontroller sy stem, the interface provides for dynamic updating of the operating program. It also re lieves the constraints imposed on the number of bus devices accessible to the microcont roller system because of the limited number of I/O pins available on the microcontrolle r.