April 18, 1994
In order for I/O drivers to detect and configure a PCMCIA card properly, PCMCIA driver software is needed. PCMCIA software is divided into two parts: Socket Services (SS) and Card Services (CS).
Socket Services, the lowest layer of PCMCIA software, is a standard software interface to the hardware that controls sockets for PCMCIA cards. It hides the hardware details that implement PCMCIA sockets on the system so that higher-level software can control and use PCMCIA cards without any information about the actual hardware interface.
CS is a layer above SS, and manages PCMCIA card and system resources. Card Services takes requests from multiple processes known as clients. These clients can be device drivers, system utilities, or application programs. Card Services processes their requests and, if necessary, sends them to Socket Services. Clients can use Card Services to assign system resources, such as memory ranges, I/O ranges, and interrupt request (IRQ) levels, to a PCMCIA card when it is inserted.
4. Who produces the SS/CS which National Instruments provides?
The third party vendor we use is a combination of two companies, Award Software Inc. and Ventura Micro Inc. Their product is called CardWare. It provides not only SS/CS, but also generic utilities that you can use with other PCMCIA cards such as modems, SCSI, LANs, memory, disk drives, etc.
5. With what platforms does CardWare work?
The SS/CS distributed by CardWare supports only DOS and Windows platforms.
6. With what PCMCIA controller chips does CardWare work?
Currently CardWare supports these PCMCIA controller chips: Intel 82365L (PCIC), Intel PHIC, Cirrus Logic PD 6710/6720, Vadem VG465, Toshiba ToPIC, and Toshiba TPP163.