Motherboard

Submitted By:Nisha .R. Nair

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Meaning:The motherboard is the main circuit board inside your PC. Every components at some point communicates through the motherboard, either by directly plugging into it or by communicating through one of the motherboards ports. The motherboard is one big communication highway. Its purpose inside your PC is to provide a platform for all the other components and peripherals to talk to each other.

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Components of Motherboard:(1) Processor/Socket:

The CPU is usually installed in a socket. The socket specifications are generally numbered. This number is generally base on socket or slot number that is on the motherboard, this lets the designer of the system know that exactly what type of processors can be installed.

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Chipset:

A chipset, PC chipset or chip set refers to a group of integrated circuits, or chips, that are designed to work together. They are usually marketed as a single product. In computing, the term chipset is commonly used to refer to a set of specialized chips on a computer's motherboard or an expansion card. The term chipset often refers to a specific pair of chips on the motherboard: the northbridge and the southbridge. The northbridge links the CPU to very highspeed devices, especially main memory and graphics controllers, and the southbridge connects to lower-speed peripheral buses (such as PCI or ISA). In many modern chipsets, the southbridge actually contains some on-chip integrated peripherals, such as Ethernet, USB, and audio devices. A chipset is usually designed to work with a specific family of microprocessors. Because it controls communications between the processor and external devices, the chipset plays a crucial role in determining system performance.

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Super I/O chips:

A super I/O chip combines interfaces for a variety of low-bandwidth devices. The functions provided usually include:

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A floppy disk controller A parallel port (commonly used for printers) One or more serial ports A keyboard and mouse interface. Temperature sensor and fanspeed monitoring

A super I/O chip may also have other interfaces, such as a game port or an infrared port. By combining many functions in a single chip, the number of parts needed on a motherboard is reduced, thus reducing the cost of production. The original super I/O chips communicated with the central processing unit via a connection with an Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus. With the evolution away from ISA towards use of the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus, the Super I/O chip was often the biggest remaining reason for continuing inclusion of ISA on the motherboard. Modern super I/O chips use the Low Pin Count (LPC) bus instead of ISA for communication with the CPU. This normally occurs through an LPC interface on the southbridge chip of the motherboard.

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BIOS

All motherboards contain a special chip containing software known as BIOS, BIOS stands for Basic Input/output system. BIOS is a collection of programs embedded in EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory). When we start computer, this collection of programs get loaded into the computer even before operating system. The BIOS chip contains basically startup program and drivers that are used to get the system running and act as the interface to the basic hardware in the system. In most of the PCs, BIOS performs four main function. (1) Power-on self Test (POST)

It test computers processor memory, chipset, video, adapter, disk controller, disk drives, keyboards and other components.

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Boot strap loader

It is a routine that searches for operating system. If operating system is found, then next job of it is to load it into the system which further enables the system function. (3) Basic Input Output system (BIOS)

This is the collection of actual drivers that are used to provide a basic interface between operating system and hardware. (4) System configuration and setup programs (CMOS)

Configuration program that allows you to configure hardware settings including system settings such as computer passwords, time and date.

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