ISA System Architecture

ISA architecture was introduced to the computer market long ago but is still alive for the PC/104 bus micro-controller world. I have been searching for documents realated to the ISA architecture but found only this book the best book that helped me in designing products interfacing to the ISA bus.

This book lays all the groundwork necessary for people who want to learn computer hardware. Especially, it teachs you the basic knowledge you need for all subsequent Mindshare books in PC Architecture Series. The book partitions its content into several parts: 1. CPU: how the CPU fetchs the instructions from memory, and how the CPU process and stores the data inside its registers. 2. INTERFACE: how the CPU communicates with the rest of the peripherals on the motherboard. 3. MEMORY: how the system memory, cache memory and ROM works. Among other things, the book explains the refresh cycle in the sytem memory, the algorithm of the cache controller and ROM self checking for errors. 3. ISA BUS: Among other things, the book examines every single line of ISA bus, the Interrupt, DMA, Timers and Numeric Coprocessors. Because this book is about ISA bus, the only CPU described in details are the 8086, 8088, 286 and 386. Eventhough these CPUs are old and nobody use ISA bus anymore, you will need to understand them before you can learn more advanced CPU and system bus, such as Pentium 4 and PCI bus. The prerequisite to read this book is a solid understanding of Digital Logic Design, especially the Hex number, decoder, mux, flip flop, latch and state machine.

Just completed the book. Excellent coverage of the ISA Bus -- from the hardware as well as software point of view. Book also covers the peripheral support chips (8237,8259, etc) that are attached to the Bus -- as well as the operating modes of various x86 processors.Definetly geared towards Operating System Developers.

I like this book since it covers the ISA bus in a very compresive way. It is a good book on computer architecture since it descibes how the CPU attaches to the bus, and what gets attached to the bus. the authors descibe the evolution of the bus by discussing how the CPU (286,386,..) attached to the bus evolves. i like how the book is organized... you dont have to go searching all over the place for information. everything is presented thoroughly and without convolution so that you dont have to start with the first chapter, or, when you refer back to the book, you dont have to read a bunch of other chapters.

The examples and explanations of why and how the ISA architecture functions in a standard PC were a great help for me. As the book progresses, one can appreciate the complexity of the ISA architecture, yet I didn't get "lost" from chapter to chapter. Without this resource, I probably wouldn't have been able to complete a major design project and graduate from college.