
158 Embedded systems design
XON-XOFF flow control
Connecting these wires together and using the correct pins
is not a trivial job and two alternative approaches have been
developed. The first is the development of more intelligent UARTs
that handle the flow control directly with little or no intervention
from the processor. The second is to dispense with hardware
handshaking completely and simply use software handshaking
where characters are sent to control the flow of characters between
the two systems. This latter approach is used by Apple Macintosh,
UNIX and many other systems because of its reduced complexity
in terms of the hardware interface and ...