Protean has applied our firmware development skills to produce some specially programmed controllers that serve very specific needs. These devices have fixed purpose and are, generally speaking, not programmable. By using these inexpensive ICs, the real-time burden, or I/O burden of the host processor can be drastically reduced.

The following is a list of peripheral processor ICs currently available:

Xtender73 - A 28 pin IC that provides 8 additional I/O lines, implements RS232, PWM, etc. It is connected to the host via an I2C connection. In the case of a TICkit host, it can use the EEprom I2C bus, thus requiring no I/O lines to interface. A 19.6608 MHz Xtal is required.

RSB509 - A 8 pin IC that buffers RS232 serial input data up to 32 characters. This device allows single thread host processors, like Parallax's BASIC STAMP to receive serial data in background. A 4.00 MHz Xtal is required.

RSB6507 - A 14 pin IC that buffers RS232 serial input data up to 64 characters. This device can be cascaded for larger buffers and can buffer input data up to 38,400 baud. This device implements hardware handshake and support network packet modes. This serial buffer implements special line buffering modes which work especially well with Parallax's BASIC STAMP SERIN command. A 19.6608 MHz xtal is required.