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Southbridge

Whereas the North Bridge typically is dedicated to high-speed memory arbitration and control of the access to DRAM and the AGP interface, the South Bridge microprocessor is somewhat slower and takes care of the data flow to the peripherals and integrates controller functions. Below is an overview of key buses and standards managed by today's South Bridges.

  • IDE Bus (Integrated Drive Electronics) is the most common low-cost interface for Hard Disk Drives (HDD), CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, etc.. The official specification for the IDE interface is ATA (AT Attachment). Depending on maximum transfer speed that is supported (in MB/s= Mbytes/s ) we distinguish ATA/33, ATA/66, ATA/100 and ATA/133.
  • Serial ATA
  • BIOS (Basic I/O System)
  • Low Pin Count Interface (LPC) controller, connects to Super I/O chip which then connects to serial, parallel, game port, PS/2 mouse/keyboard, infrared interface, floppy disk controller, several general purpose I/O pins, fan RPM control.
  • SMBus controller plus connector (serial interface to interface to external processor checking 'health' of the system)
  • Interrupts, DMA controllers, timer, real-time clock (RTC) are included in the South Bridge for ISA compatibility,
  • USB (Universal Serial Bus) controller,
  • IEEE 1394 (Firewire) controller,
  • AC Link (Audio Codec Link), provides on-board audio and telephony (modem/networking) facilities. Current version is AC'97 2.2
  • Integrated LAN controller. For networking system designers are looking to move processing off add-in cards and into the chipset. The AC Link (maybe with extra LAN pins) will be used for driving DSL, HPNA (Home Phone Networking Alliance) and Ethernet. The idea is, that PC vendors use special riser cards (with the sockets) that include the interfaces needed by the user. The cost of the riser card will be less than a PCI card, since the PCI interface adds to the cost of the chip. Integrated LAN controllers (like 10/100 Ethernet) typically link to the PCI bus and also provide Wake on LAN (WOL) functionality.
  • For servers there is an opposite trend, where networking is preferably delegated to cards in order to offload the CPU.
  • Power management features are also built into the South Bridge.

Courtesy of the French Energy Agency ADEME, Future Electronics project.

 


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