On Fri, 29 Sep 2000, Gregg C Levine wrote:
> Hello again from Gregg C Levine usually with Jedi Knight Computers
> I suppose it is too much to ask, if you saw my message? The part may indeed be
> genuine, but the board design may not be. Let us wait and see if Kevin P. Neal
> takes my advice.

What could be wrong with the board design? I have a 4 port 16650 card in
my 386; works great with the tcom driver. I even add code to twiddle the
extra bits to turn on automatic hardware flow control (when the FIFO
starts to fill up, the chip will lower RTS without the computer having
to tell it to). The code's been in NetBSD for almost 3 years, BTW...
it's certainly not a new chip :) See the description of revision 1.116
at http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/syssrc/sys/dev/ic/com.c

> Texas, then it is indeed for real, and it is made by TI. Also check
> the size of the chip. It should look like a Quad Flat Pack, type
> device. Although the last I heard, TI, was experimenting with
> stuffing it into the usual DIP40 package.

And the 16550 is/was made by many more manufacturers than TI, and has
been available in DIP packaging for ages too... since day 1, I'd say. It
was a common upgrade for people who had old multifunction I/O cards with
socketed UARTs to replace their 8250/16450s with 16550s in order to use
their speedy new 14.4k modems, etc :)
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