The RS-232 mode supports data communication rates of up to 921.6kb/s, while the RS-422 and RS-485 modes support data communication speeds of up to 3Mb/s. The mPCIe-COM cards, which provide ±15kV ESD protection, were designed using type 16C950 UARTs and 128-byte transmit/receive FIFO buffers to decrease CPU loading and protect against lost data in multitasking systems. New systems can continue to interface with legacy serial peripherals but benefit from the use of the high performance PCIe bus. Fully software compatible with current PCI and PCIe 16550 type UART applications, the cards allow users to maintain backward compatibility.
The mPCIe-COM cards are suitable for military, defence and medical applications, among others.To simplify the verification of COM port operation, the cards are offered with a driver support package, which includes a Windows terminal programme for testing COM ports. The cards are compatible with DOS, Linux and 32-bit and 64-bit Windows OSs.