A report on Floppy-disk controller

Zilog Z765A
5-1/4 Diskette Drive Adapter found on the IBM PC. This card is based on the NEC D765AC, the large chip at the top of the image.
Block diagram showing FDC communication with the CPU and the FDD.
A setup disk of Japanese Microsoft Office 4.3, provided with 3.5" 1.2 MB and 1440 KB formats.

Special-purpose integrated circuit (IC or "chip") and associated disk controller circuitry that directs and controls reading from and writing to a computer's floppy disk drive (FDD).

- Floppy-disk controller
Zilog Z765A

6 related topics with Alpha

Overall
8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disks

Floppy disk

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Obsolete type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk.

Obsolete type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk.

8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disks
8-inch, 5¼-inch (full height), and 3½-inch drives
A 3½-inch floppy disk removed from its housing
8-inch floppy disk, inserted in drive, (3½-inch floppy diskette, in front, shown for scale)
3½-inch, high-density floppy diskettes with adhesive labels affixed
Imation USB floppy drive, model 01946: an external drive that accepts high-density disks
Front and rear of a retail 3½-inch and 5¼-inch floppy disk cleaning kit, as sold in Australia at retailer Big W, circa early 1990s
Different data storage media (Examples include: Flash drive, CD, Tape drive, and CompactFlash)
A floppy hardware emulator, same size as a 3½-inch drive, provides a USB interface to the user
Screenshot depicting a floppy disk as "save" icon
Inside the 8-inch floppy disk
Disk notcher converts single-sided 5¼-inch diskettes to double-sided.
Rear side of a 3½-inch floppy disk in a transparent case, showing its internal parts
The spindle motor from a 3½‑inch unit
A read-write head from a 3½‑inch unit
How the read-write head is applied on the floppy
Visualization of magnetic information on floppy disk (image recorded with CMOS-MagView)
8-inch floppy disk
A 3 1⁄2-inch floppy disk drive
A box of about 80 floppy disks together with one USB memory stick. The stick is capable of holding over 130 times as much data as the entire box of disks put together.

Hardware floppy disk emulators can be made to interface floppy-disk controllers to a USB port that can be used for flash drives.

Diagram of a motherboard, which supports many on-board peripheral functions as well as several expansion slots.

Super I/O

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Class of I/O controller integrated circuits that began to be used on personal computer motherboards in the late 1980s, originally as add-in cards, later embedded on the motherboards.

Class of I/O controller integrated circuits that began to be used on personal computer motherboards in the late 1980s, originally as add-in cards, later embedded on the motherboards.

Diagram of a motherboard, which supports many on-board peripheral functions as well as several expansion slots.
ITE Super I/O chip (IT8712F)
SMSC (now Microchip) Super I/O chip (FDC37M813) on IBM motherboard

A floppy-disk controller

Low Pin Count interface Winbond chip

Low Pin Count

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Computer bus used on IBM-compatible personal computers to connect low-bandwidth devices to the CPU, such as the BIOS ROM (BIOS ROM was moved to the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) bus in 2006 ), "legacy" I/O devices (integrated into Super I/O, Embedded Controller or IPMI chip), and Trusted Platform Module (TPM).

Computer bus used on IBM-compatible personal computers to connect low-bandwidth devices to the CPU, such as the BIOS ROM (BIOS ROM was moved to the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) bus in 2006 ), "legacy" I/O devices (integrated into Super I/O, Embedded Controller or IPMI chip), and Trusted Platform Module (TPM).

Low Pin Count interface Winbond chip
Trusted Platform Module installed on a motherboard, and using the LPC bus
A diagram showing the LPC bus connecting the southbridge, the flash ROM, and the Super I/O chip

"Legacy" I/O devices usually include serial and parallel ports, PS/2 keyboard, PS/2 mouse, and floppy disk controller.

Group coded recording

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In computer science, group coded recording or group code recording (GCR) refers to several distinct but related encoding methods for representing data on magnetic media.

In computer science, group coded recording or group code recording (GCR) refers to several distinct but related encoding methods for representing data on magnetic media.

Offering GCR-compatible diskette drives and floppy disk controllers (like the 100163-51-8 and 100163-52-6 ), Micropolis endorsed data encoding with group coded recording on 5¼-inch 100 tpi 77-track diskette drives to store twelve 512-byte sectors per track since 1977 or 1978.

The Atari 810 was typical of FM-based floppy drives of the early 1980s home computer era.

Frequency modulation encoding

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Method of storing data that saw widespread use in early floppy disk drives and hard disk drives.

Method of storing data that saw widespread use in early floppy disk drives and hard disk drives.

The Atari 810 was typical of FM-based floppy drives of the early 1980s home computer era.

For instance, if a byte of data from the original system contains the bits 01000001, the floppy disk controller will translate this into the series 1011101010101011, inserting additional signals in front of every bit to represent the clock.

Interrupt request (PC architecture)

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Interrupt request is a hardware signal sent to the processor that temporarily stops a running program and allows a special program, an interrupt handler, to run instead.

Interrupt request is a hardware signal sent to the processor that temporarily stops a running program and allows a special program, an interrupt handler, to run instead.

IRQ 6 – floppy disk controller