Serial and UART Tutorial

Synchronous serial transmission requires that the sender and receiver share a clock with one another, or that the sender provide a strobe or other timing signal so that the receiver knows when to “read” the next bit of the data. In most forms of serial Synchronous communication, if there is no data available at a given instant to transmit, a fill character must be sent instead so that data is always being transmitted. Synchronous communication is usually more efficient because only data bits are transmitted between sender and receiver, and synchronous communication can be more costly if extra wiring and circuits are required to share a clock signal between the sender and receiver.

A form of Synchronous transmission is used with printers and fixed disk devices in that the data is sent on one set of wires while a clock or strobe is sent on a different wire. Printers and fixed disk devices are not normally serial devices because most fixed disk interface standards send an entire word of data for each clock or strobe signal by using a separate wire for each bit of the word. In the PC industry, these are known as Parallel devices.

The standard serial communications hardware in the PC does not support Synchronous operations. This mode is described here for comparison purposes only.

Asynchronous transmission allows data to be transmitted without the sender having to send a clock signal to the receiver. Instead, the sender and receiver must agree on timing parameters in advance and special bits are added to each word which are used to synchronize the sending and receiving units.

When a word is given to the UART for Asynchronous transmissions, a bit called the "Start Bit" is added to the beginning of each word that is to be transmitted. The Start Bit is used to alert the receiver that a word of data is about to be sent, and to force the clock in the receiver into synchronization with the clock in the transmitter. These two clocks must be accurate enough to not have the frequency drift by more than 10% during the transmission of the remaining bits in the word. (This requirement was set in the days of mechanical teleprinters and is easily met by modern electronic equipment.)

After the Start Bit, the individual bits of the word of data are sent, with the Least Significant Bit (LSB) being sent first. Each bit in the transmission is transmitted for exactly the same amount of time as all of the other bits, and the receiver “looks” at the wire at approximately halfway through the period assigned to each bit to determine if the bit is a 1 or a 0. For example, if it takes two seconds to send each bit, the receiver will examine the signal to determine if it is a 1 or a 0 after one second has passed, then it will wait two seconds and then examine the value of the next bit, and so on.

The sender does not know when the receiver has “looked” at the value of the bit. The sender only knows when the clock says to begin transmitting the next bit of the word.

When the entire data word has been sent, the transmitter may add a Parity Bit that the transmitter generates. The Parity Bit may be used by the receiver to perform simple error checking. Then at least one Stop Bit is sent by the transmitter.

When the receiver has received all of the bits in the data word, it may check for the Parity Bits (both sender and receiver must agree on whether a Parity Bit is to be used), and then the receiver looks for a Stop Bit. If the Stop Bit does not appear when it is supposed to, the UART considers the entire word to be garbled and will report a Framing Error to the host processor when the data word is read. The usual cause of a Framing Error is that the sender and receiver clocks were not running at the same speed, or that the signal was interrupted.

Regardless of whether the data was received correctly or not, the UART automatically discards the Start, Parity and Stop bits. If the sender and receiver are configured identically, these bits are not passed to the host.

If another word is ready for transmission, the Start Bit for the new word can be sent as soon as the Stop Bit for the previous word has been sent.

Because asynchronous data is “self synchronizing”, if there is no data to transmit, the transmission line can be idle.

In addition to the basic job of converting data from parallel to serial for transmission and from serial to parallel on reception, a UART will usually provide additional circuits for signals that can be used to indicate the state of the transmission media, and to regulate the flow of data in the event that the remote device is not prepared to accept more data. For example, when the device connected to the UART is a modem, the modem may report the presence of a carrier on the phone line while the computer may be able to instruct the modem to reset itself or to not take calls by raising or lowering one more of these extra signals. The function of each of these additional signals is defined in the EIA RS232-C standard.

In most computer systems, the UART is connected to circuitry that generates signals that comply with the EIA RS232-C specification. There is also a CCITT standard named V.24 that mirrors the specifications included in RS232-C.

Baud is a measurement of transmission speed in asynchronous communication. Because of advances in modem communication technology, this term is frequently misused when describing the data rates in newer devices.

Traditionally, a Baud Rate represents the number of bits that are actually being sent over the media, not the amount of data that is actually moved from one DTE device to the other. The Baud count includes the overhead bits Start, Stop and Parity that are generated by the sending UART and removed by the receiving UART. This means that seven-bit words of data actually take 10 bits to be completely transmitted. Therefore, a modem capable of moving 300 bits per second from one place to another can normally only move 30 7-bit words if Parity is used and one Start and Stop bit are present.

If 8-bit data words are used and Parity bits are also used, the data rate falls to 27.27 words per second, because it now takes 11 bits to send the eight-bit words, and the modem still only sends 300 bits per second.

The formula for converting bytes per second into a baud rate and vice versa was simple until error-correcting modems came along. These modems receive the serial stream of bits from the UART in the host computer (even when internal modems are used the data is still frequently serialized) and converts the bits back into bytes. These bytes are then combined into packets and sent over the phone line using a Synchronous transmission method. This means that the Stop, Start, and Parity bits added by the UART in the DTE (the computer) were removed by the modem before transmission by the sending modem. When these bytes are received by the remote modem, the remote modem adds Start, Stop and Parity bits to the words, converts them to a serial format and then sends them to the receiving UART in the remote computer, who then strips the Start, Stop and Parity bits.

The reason all these extra conversions are done is so that the two modems can perform error correction, which means that the receiving modem is able to ask the sending modem to resend a block of data that was not received with the correct checksum. This checking is handled by the modems, and the DTE devices are usually unaware that the process is occurring.

By striping the Start, Stop and Parity bits, the additional bits of data that the two modems must share between themselves to perform error-correction are mostly concealed from the effective transmission rate seen by the sending and receiving DTE equipment. For example, if a modem sends ten 7-bit words to another modem without including the Start, Stop and Parity bits, the sending modem will be able to add 30 bits of its own information that the receiving modem can use to do error-correction without impacting the transmission speed of the real data.

The use of the term Baud is further confused by modems that perform compression. A single 8-bit word passed over the telephone line might represent a dozen words that were transmitted to the sending modem. The receiving modem will expand the data back to its original content and pass that data to the receiving DTE.

Modern modems also include buffers that allow the rate that bits move across the phone line (DCE to DCE) to be a different speed than the speed that the bits move between the DTE and DCE on both ends of the conversation. Normally the speed between the DTE and DCE is higher than the DCE to DCE speed because of the use of compression by the modems.

Because the number of bits needed to describe a byte varied during the trip between the two machines plus the differing bits-per-seconds speeds that are used present on the DTE-DCE and DCE-DCE links, the usage of the term Baud to describe the overall communication speed causes problems and can misrepresent the true transmission speed. So Bits Per Second (bps) is the correct term to use to describe the transmission rate seen at the DCE to DCE interface and Baud or Bits Per Second are acceptable terms to use when a connection is made between two systems with a wired connection, or if a modem is in use that is not performing error-correction or compression.

Modern high speed modems (2400, 9600, 14,400, and 19,200bps) in reality still operate at or below 2400 baud, or more accurately, 2400 Symbols per second. High speed modem are able to encode more bits of data into each Symbol using a technique called Constellation Stuffing, which is why the effective bits per second rate of the modem is higher, but the modem continues to operate within the limited audio bandwidth that the telephone system provides. Modems operating at 28,800 and higher speeds have variable Symbol rates, but the technique is the same.

Starting with the original IBM Personal Computer, IBM selected the National Semiconductor INS8250 UART for use in the IBM PC Parallel/Serial Adapter. Subsequent generations of compatible computers from IBM and other vendors continued to use the INS8250 or improved versions of the National Semiconductor UART family.

INS8250  -> INS8250B
  \
   \
    \-> INS8250A -> INS82C50A
             \
              \
               \-> NS16450 -> NS16C450
                        \
                         \
                          \-> NS16550 -> NS16550A -> PC16550D

Over the years, the 8250, 8250A, 16450 and 16550 have been licensed or copied by other chip vendors. In the case of the 8250, 8250A and 16450, the exact circuit (the “megacell”) was licensed to many vendors, including Western Digital and Intel. Other vendors reverse-engineered the part or produced emulations that had similar behavior.

In internal modems, the modem designer will frequently emulate the 8250A/16450 with the modem microprocessor, and the emulated UART will frequently have a hidden buffer consisting of several hundred bytes. Because of the size of the buffer, these emulations can be as reliable as a 16550A in their ability to handle high speed data. However, most operating systems will still report that the UART is only a 8250A or 16450, and may not make effective use of the extra buffering present in the emulated UART unless special drivers are used.

Some modem makers are driven by market forces to abandon a design that has hundreds of bytes of buffer and instead use a 16550A UART so that the product will compare favorably in market comparisons even though the effective performance may be lowered by this action.

A common misconception is that all parts with “16550A” written on them are identical in performance. There are differences, and in some cases, outright flaws in most of these 16550A clones.

When the NS16550 was developed, the National Semiconductor obtained several patents on the design and they also limited licensing, making it harder for other vendors to provide a chip with similar features. Because of the patents, reverse-engineered designs and emulations had to avoid infringing the claims covered by the patents. Subsequently, these copies almost never perform exactly the same as the NS16550A or PC16550D, which are the parts most computer and modem makers want to buy but are sometimes unwilling to pay the price required to get the genuine part.

Some of the differences in the clone 16550A parts are unimportant, while others can prevent the device from being used at all with a given operating system or driver. These differences may show up when using other drivers, or when particular combinations of events occur that were not well tested or considered in the Windows® driver. This is because most modem vendors and 16550-clone makers use the Microsoft drivers from Windows® for Workgroups 3.11 and the Microsoft® MS-DOS® utility as the primary tests for compatibility with the NS16550A. This over-simplistic criteria means that if a different operating system is used, problems could appear due to subtle differences between the clones and genuine components.

National Semiconductor has made available a program named COMTEST that performs compatibility tests independent of any OS drivers. It should be remembered that the purpose of this type of program is to demonstrate the flaws in the products of the competition, so the program will report major as well as extremely subtle differences in behavior in the part being tested.

In a series of tests performed by the author of this document in 1994, components made by National Semiconductor, TI, StarTech, and CMD as well as megacells and emulations embedded in internal modems were tested with COMTEST. A difference count for some of these components is listed below. Because these tests were performed in 1994, they may not reflect the current performance of the given product from a vendor.

It should be noted that COMTEST normally aborts when an excessive number or certain types of problems have been detected. As part of this testing, COMTEST was modified so that it would not abort no matter how many differences were encountered.

It is important to understand that a simple count of differences from COMTEST does not reveal a lot about what differences are important and which are not. For example, about half of the differences reported in the two modems listed above that have internal UARTs were caused by the clone UARTs not supporting five- and six-bit character modes. The real 16550, 16450, and 8250 UARTs all support these modes and COMTEST checks the functionality of these modes so over fifty differences are reported. However, almost no modern modem supports five- or six-bit characters, particularly those with error-correction and compression capabilities. This means that the differences related to five- and six-bit character modes can be discounted.

Many of the differences COMTEST reports have to do with timing. In many of the clone designs, when the host reads from one port, the status bits in some other port may not update in the same amount of time (some faster, some slower) as a real NS16550AFN and COMTEST looks for these differences. This means that the number of differences can be misleading in that one device may only have one or two differences but they are extremely serious, and some other device that updates the status registers faster or slower than the reference part (that would probably never affect the operation of a properly written driver) could have dozens of differences reported.

COMTEST can be used as a screening tool to alert the administrator to the presence of potentially incompatible components that might cause problems or have to be handled as a special case.

If you run COMTEST on a 16550 that is in a modem or a modem is attached to the serial port, you need to first issue a ATE0&W command to the modem so that the modem will not echo any of the test characters. If you forget to do this, COMTEST will report at least this one difference:

Error (6)...Timeout interrupt failed: IIR = c1  LSR = 61

The 8250/16450/16550 UART occupies eight contiguous I/O port addresses. In the IBM PC, there are two defined locations for these eight ports and they are known collectively as COM1 and COM2. The makers of PC-clones and add-on cards have created two additional areas known as COM3 and COM4, but these extra COM ports conflict with other hardware on some systems. The most common conflict is with video adapters that provide IBM 8514 emulation.

COM1 is located from 0x3f8 to 0x3ff and normally uses IRQ 4. COM2 is located from 0x2f8 to 0x2ff and normally uses IRQ 3. COM3 is located from 0x3e8 to 0x3ef and has no standardized IRQ. COM4 is located from 0x2e8 to 0x2ef and has no standardized IRQ.

A description of the I/O ports of the 8250/16450/16550 UART is provided below.

Although National Semiconductor has not offered any components compatible with the 16550 that provide additional features, various other vendors have. Some of these components are described below. It should be understood that to effectively utilize these improvements, drivers may have to be provided by the chip vendor since most of the popular operating systems do not support features beyond those provided by the 16550.

In addition to these “dumb” UARTs, many vendors produce intelligent serial communication boards. This type of design usually provides a microprocessor that interfaces with several UARTs, processes and buffers the data, and then alerts the main PC processor when necessary. Because the UARTs are not directly accessed by the PC processor in this type of communication system, it is not necessary for the vendor to use UARTs that are compatible with the 8250, 16450, or the 16550 UART. This leaves the designer free to components that may have better performance characteristics.