Like I said, most of the processors and controllers, come with UART. Apart from this, the USB standard advertises a Communications Device Class (CDC) which didn’t kick off very well for a lot of reasons. There are some other not-so-popular alternatives such as, a PCI/PCIExpress card to achieve the same functionality. I mentioned these two as they are the most popular chips. Some popular alternatives are USB to Serial converters such as FTDI’s FT232A or Silicon lab’s CP10x to emulate a serial port through USB on our new computers. Most (if not all) of today’s laptops and desktops don’t ship with a serial port connector on them. Slowly this trend crept into the PC market as well and motherboard manufacturers stopped putting those connectors. It later turned out the connector was too fat to be on laptops any more. The sender up’s his level to RS232 and expects the receiver to bring it to his level somehow.įor this reason, a massive D-Sub 9 connector or DE-9 Connector (often mistakenly referred to as the DB-9 connector) was chosen to improve stability of the contact. This also addresses the problem of logic level compatibility between the interface hardware. Since motherboards operate at 3.3 volts, they had to put out these UART lines through RS232 levels to increase the cable distance. For this reason, it is very easy to implement it in the chip’s silicon, making it very easy for us to configure and get it up and running almost immediately. UART, as a protocol, is primitive (it should take you roughly 15 minutes to know it all). Be it an 8 bit system handling meager tasks or a massive 64 bit system running Linux. UART is one of the most preferred form of debugging in embedded platforms. Good old desktop users might have a shot at a native COM port in your computer! Just read along. If you are a full-time laptop user, stop right here! This article is of no help to you. If you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it ain’t there!

Your Desktop-PC doesn’t have a Serial Port in the back side? Don’t be so sure of it.

Serial port pinout computer db9