Understanding main board chip functions

In addition to CPU sockets, various slots and interfaces, the motherboard also has many chips. In addition to the Motherboard chipset, most of the other larger chips are functional chips, which provide some specific functions for the motherboard.
1. BIOS chip
The motherboard has a very important chip-BIOS chip. It is a flash memory chip that stores the most important basic input and output in the computer. Program , System settings, boot self-check program, etc. In order to ensure that the above program will not be lost after power failure, the motherboard manufacturer specially "arranged" A button battery to provide power for it (figure 1 ).

2. motherboard I/O Chip
The main board I/O chip provides support for keyboard, mouse, soft drive, parallel port, serial port, game joystick, and other devices. The new I/O chip also provides various monitoring and protection functions. Currently, common I/O chips mainly include WINBOND w83627ehf, w83627thf (Figure 2), and it8712f (Figure 3) of lianyang Technology (ITE ).

3. SATA Hard Disk control chip
Although many Southern bridge chips now provide direct support for SATA hard disks, some southern bridges on the main board do not support SATA disks. Therefore, these boards often provide SATA interfaces by integrating third-party chips. Common SATA control chips include sil3114ct176, sil3?act144, and sis180 of SIS.
Sil3114ct176 (figure 4) supports four SATA interfaces (the previous generation of the sil3366act144 chip only supports two) and three SATA raid modes, such as RAID 0/1/0 + 1. The sis180 supports two SATA interfaces and one ATA/133 ide interface. It supports three SATA raid modes, including RAID 0/1/0 + 1.

4. Audio Codec Chip
Today, the main board is integrated with sound cards, and the integrated sound card is indispensable to the Audio Codec Chip. Therefore, the Main Board generally carries an Audio Codec Chip. At present, the main board uses such chips as RealTek or C-media, such as RealTek's alc880 (figure 5), alc800, and alc650, xixun company cmi9880 and so on.

5. Nic control chip
Nowadays, NICS have become the "standard" component of the motherboard. Currently, almost all Nic chips integrated with the new motherboard are Gigabit NICs. Generally, one RealTek rtl8110s or Marvell 88e8001 chip is used on the motherboard integrated with only one Nic interface (figure 6 ).