Method of operation of a host adapter integrated circuit

Abstract

The host adapter integrated circuit is a one chip high performance bus master host adapter for (i) connecting a first bus having a specified protocol for transferring information over the first bus and a first data transfer speed to a second bus having a specified protocol for transferring information over the second bus and a second data transfer speed, and (ii) transferring information between the two buses. The host adapter integrated circuit, hereinafter host adapter, includes a novel reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processor, a first interface module circuit connectable to the first bus and coupled to the RISC processor, a second interface module circuit connectable to the second bus and coupled to the RISC processor, and a memory circuit means connected to the first interface module circuit and to the second interface module circuit and coupled to the RISC processor. An I/O bus interconnects the first interface module circuit, the second interface module circuit, the memory circuit means, and the RISC processor. The I/O bus supports a read and a write operation by the RISC processor in single clock cycle of the RISC processor. The host adapter supports many features found in traditional add-in card SCSI host adapters. These features include bus master transfers, fast/wide SCSI, one interrupt per command, scatter/gather, overlapped seeks, tagged queuing, etc.