Interworld Electronics has added the PCIe-COM232 Series PCI Express Serial Cards from ACCES I/O to its wide range of communications products.
The PCIe-COM232 Series are multi-port serial communication cards that deliver eight (PCIe-COM232-8) or four (PCIe-COM232-4), high-speed, RS-232 ports for use in a wide variety of applications. The communication cards were designed to add serial ports to PCI Express bus computer systems. Integrators and manufacturers of industrial and commercial systems can now provide backward compatibility with legacy serial communications.
Based on high performance 16C950 UARTs with 128-byte FIFO buffers for TX and RX, each RS-232 port is capable of supporting data rates up to 460.8kbps fro the standard models or up to 921.6kbps for the high speed models. Additionally, full modem control signals are provided to ensure compatibility with a broad variety of serial devices. Existing serial peripherals can connect directly to the industry standard DB9M connectors, which are provided on the 2 meter breakout cable that ships with each card. The communication cards feature a x1 lane PCI Express connector which can be used in any available x1, x2, x4, x8 or x12 PCI Express expansion slot. The x16 PCI Express slot on some motherboards can also be used.
Additionally, +/- 15kV electrostatic discharge protection on the receive and transmit pins protects the cards from switching transients generated by heavy industrial machinery. The communication cards are only 2.2" (55.8mm) high and conform to the MD1 low profile form factor making them ideal for installation in 2RU industrial computers and servers. Optional full height brackets are also available.