I've searched and searched Google and may I'm not searching for the right words, but I can't find what I need.

Does anyone know of a chip that is an asynchronous serial in-serial out fifo? Even better would be if it's got more than 1 serial fifo. I'd like at least a 16byte buffer in the fifo.

Alternatively, does anyone know of a small inexpensive microcontroller that has a free c compiler and at least 2 asynchronous serial ports?

Thanks!
El3ctroded

 

I don't know about the FIFO, but have you looked into the Atmel AVR line of microcontrollers?

You may also think about building the functions that you need into a small FPGA or CPLD from Xilinx or Altera or ... I know Xilinx has a "FIFO Generator" as part of their programmable logic parts. You could include all of your FIFOs in a single package.

 

I haven't looked into the Atmel controllers... I usually use PIC. It's just they don't have any small solution with 2 serial ports. I'm open to using a different mcu, but was just inquiring if anyone knew of a good solution before delving into a project to do it myself.

I had thought of using a FPGA/CPLD, but had read most do not have ram so no way to store data... It needs to be small and cheap because the only function I need is serial fifo because I have 2 serial devices that could receive data at any time and there's no way to do flow control on one of them, so I could possibly miss data on that one without a fifo. If the xylinx has a fifo, and is cheap and small enough, it could work. I'll look into it.

Thanks!
El3ctroded

 

The MAX3100 has a 16 byte FIFO on the receiver. You don't really need one on the transmitter.

 

A lot of the PC UARTs they used to use in PC serial ports come standard with 16 byte FIFO buffers built in. These chips should be easily available cheap surplus these days.

Try google for "serial UART 16byte FIFO".