ATI SMBus

Windows device driver information for ATI SMBus

The System Management Bus (SMBus) is a two-wire interface based on principals of operation of I²C. It enables simple power and system management chips to communicate with the entire system. It is used to pass messages to and from devices rather than using individual control lines thus reducing pin count. The System Management Bus enables the device to provide information on the manufacturer, report errors and accept control parameters. The SMBus device driver is implemented as a class- SMBCMICL.SYS and mini port driver; SMBCMIHC.SYS. The device receives requests that are in the form of IOCTLs (I/O control) and converts them into suitable ACPI smbUS control methods. The SMBus has features that include; a quick command, write read byte, send receive byte, CRC-8 Packet Error Checking, word write/read block and Block slave SMBus. The driver has a max speed of 100 kHz.

The SMBus device driver can be supported by Windows 2000 and 98, because it uses ACPI control methods to interface with the SMBus, a user must enable ACPI. The other feature of the driver is that it conforms to the system Management Bus specification v 1.0 and v 1.1. The driver further has a multi master capability with data format similar to I2C 7-bit addressing format. In addition, the SMBus device driver has an ability to create a device object for each ACPI enumerate SMBus segment. Higher-level drivers enumerate the SMBus device interface by using the Device Interfaces kernel function using the SMB_GUID. This task returns an indicator to the SMBus device point that may be passed IOCTLs via the IoCallDriver kernel function. Various driver are essential for the support of the ATI SMBus, they should be installed into the system before the actual installation of the ATI SMBus. These drivers can be fond in the same website as ATI SMBus. It is highly recommended you run a free registry scan for and ATI SMBus errors before installing any driver updates.