Es1373 Integrated Audio Chip - General Description - Creative Pavilion xl700 - Desktop PC Manual

ES1373 Integrated Audio Chip - General Description

The ES1373 solution is Sound Blaster 16 compatible via emulation, Roland MPU401
compatible via emulation and in full compliance with Multimedia PC Level 3 specifications. In
addition, the ES1373 meets Plug and Play specifications, eliminating any requirement for the user
to select I/O and DMA address settings through hardware or software. The card is automatically
recognized and configured by the Plug and Play host PC during installation
ES1373 is a PCI bus master and slave device that is best understood by looking at the device as
four interactive subsystems: the PCI interface, DMA control, LEGACY functions, and the
CODEC.
The PCI subsystem is a bus master interface that performs the memory accesses to keep the
audio cache buffers full and empties the A/D Converter ( or I
required. The fundamental concept of ES1373 is that the PCI interface controller has a sufficiently
large internal (on-chip) memory cache to meet the memory bandwidth requirements. There is a
sound cache block of 64 bytes for each of the audio channels. It is the responsibility of the DMA
control and the software to keep the buffers full.
All system control registers are accessed via I/O on the PCI bus. The ES1373 uses 16 Long
Words in the I/O space for control registers. All registers are read as Long Words. All registers
are written in byte word or long word format.
The ES1373 essentially implements a 3-channel DMA controller. These virtual DMA
channels are implemented via the CCB, PCI and Serial interface modules. The serial interface
signals the CCB module when a cache transfer is required (playback or record). The CCB module
then signals the PCI module to initiate a bus master data transfer. At this point the CCB and PCI
modules will control the data transfer between host system memory and the ES1373 internal cache.
The LEGACY subsystem is the circuitry required to perform Sound Blaster, OPL-FM and
MPU-401 emulation. Functionally the ES1373 traps on access of the Sound Blaster registers and
then issues the appropriate IRQ or SERR command on the PCI bus. The ES1373 handles the
Legacy DMA function in a similar fashion. The exact functionality of the block cannot be fully
disclosed at this time due to pending patent protection for the application of this technique.
The CODEC controller supports any AC97 compliant CODEC. The functionality of the A/D
and D/A sections are similar to those found in other standard CODECs. The A/D portion of the
CODEC is handled as an independent asynchronous event with a DMA buffer control structure.
Each time the A/D FIFO is filled, a Bus Master request occurs and the FIFO is transferred to main
memory.
The ES1373 also incorporates a SPDIF output. This output is capable of providing stereo
digital audio or compressed AC3 data from a soft DVD decoder.
Note: This information is Confidential and Proprietary to Creative Labs, Inc. This information is subject to change without prior
notice. Released by OEM Technical Marketing Department. Please direct any inquiries to your regional OEM Sales office. Patent
Pending.
Revision 1.0, 10/25/2000
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