The document describes the Micro Channel Architecture (MCA), a proprietary computer bus introduced by IBM in 1987. Key points:
- MCA used a 16- or 32-bit parallel bus with address, data, arbitration, and interrupt signals to connect devices. It supported synchronous and asynchronous data transfers between masters (processors, controllers) and slaves (memory, I/O devices).
- Features included DMA, burst transfers, parity checking, and flexible configuration. Addressing used separate I/O and memory spaces.
- Participants included system masters, bus masters, DMA controllers, I/O slaves, memory slaves, and DMA slaves. Arbitration determined control of the bus.