Design of PC adapter and data link driver for high speed networking

A driver program has been designed and developed to operate at the data link layer with an ANSI fiber distributed data interface (FDDI) personal computer (PC) adapter. The driver program is written in Turbo C and Turbo Assembler. It serves as a basic building block for the development and construction of higher layer communications software. The PC adapter implements the hardware conforming to the FDDI standard for a single attachment station (SAS) on the IBM-PC´s and compatibles. The driver incorporates a custom-designed software kernel that performs scheduling functions and is equipped with a C language interface. This enables main memory processing in the PC and building of frames for transmission and reception of frames to continue while awaiting keyboard input from higher level protocols. This implementation greatly enhances the parallelism and efficiency of the transmission and reception processes and reduces the link level processing overheads