AMCC pass through problem??

[Tom Stamp <TomS@Optiscan.com.au>]

Hello all,

We are designing a data acquisition system for a medical imaging
application, and it will in part be a plug in PCI card on an NT host.

I have been looking at the AMCC S5933 PCI bridge as one possible
alternative for our design. A colleague in a sister company has
mentioned some trouble utilising the pass through regions on this chip
when the local bus side was directly connected to an i386EX. I believe
there may be some trouble with the processor not giving up the bus when
required.

My question is, is there a problem with using the pass through regions
on the AMCC S5933 or is the above problem an artifact of interfacing to
the i386EX?

Our design will interface to a local CPU via a dual port RAM, and so
hopefully will not encounter such problems, but we do need to utilise a
pass through region in order to succeed.

Note that my colleague is using the latest rev. of the S5933 and has
implemented work arounds for all known errata.

I would certainly appreciate any light that can be shed on the subject,

regards,


Tom Stamp

Senior Electronics Engineer
Optiscan Pty. Ltd.
27 Normanby Rd.
Notting Hill
VIC 3168
Australia

mail:
PO Box 1066
Mt. Waverly MDC
VIC 3149
Australia

Tel: +61 3 9562 7741
Fax: +61 3 9562 7742

Email: toms@optiscan.com.au
URL: http://www.optiscan.com.au
Tom Stamp

Senior Electronics Engineer
Optiscan Pty. Ltd.
27 Normanby Rd.
Notting Hill
VIC 3168
Australia

mail:
PO Box 1066
Mt. Waverly MDC
VIC 3149
Australia

Tel: +61 3 9562 7741
Fax: +61 3 9562 7742

Email: toms@optiscan.com.au
URL: http://www.optiscan.com.au