Apparatus and method for smart host bus adapter for personal computer cards

摘要

A system is shown to improve data transfer between computers and PC Cards, which have a Host Bus Adapter (HBA). Previous HBA designs are limited in routing interrupts to the system and transferring data. The Smart HBA (150) detects an interrupt, alerts a target controller of the interrupt and provides a vector to the PC Card driver. This also eliminates acknowledgment routines and saves bus cycles. To each PC Card it appears that it is interfacing directly to its software driver. The command handling feature allows bus agents to communicate between fast access devices without using Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) commands that cannot be posted. Thus all commands can be posted in PCI bridges, no bus accesses have to wait for arbitration across multiple busses and no slow devices require a retry. Direct memory access (DMA) operations can be performed by legacy PC Cards when connected to a PCI bus.