Patent ID: 8341326

Claim:
A method of communicating between an RS-232 to I 2 C translation integrated circuit (IC) having a plurality of slave devices coupled thereto, and a host coupled to the translation IC, the translation IC further including a plurality of internal registers, and at least one input/output (I/O) port, comprising: receiving, at the translation IC, a first command stream from the host, the translation IC processing the first command stream to determine that the first command stream includes a first code indicating that a data transfer operation with at least one slave device is to be performed, a slave address, a second code indicating that the data transfer operation is a write to the slave address, an indication of the amount of data to be transferred, the indicated amount of data, and a third code indicating the end of the command stream; and writing the indicated amount of data to the slave device at the specified slave address; wherein communication between the host and the translation IC is in accordance with a first hardware protocol, and communication between the translation IC and the plurality of slave devices is in accordance with a second hardware protocol; receiving, at the translation IC, a second command stream from the host, the translation IC processing the second command stream to determine that the second command stream includes a first code indicating that a data transfer operation with at least one slave device is to be performed, a slave address, a fourth code indicating that the data transfer operation is a read from the slave device at the slave address, an indication of the amount of data to be transferred, and a third code indicating the end of the second command stream; reading the indicated amount of data from the slave device at the specified slave address; and transferring the data read from the slave device at the specified slave address to the host; receiving, at the translation IC, a third command stream from the host, the translation IC processing the third command stream to determine that the third command stream includes a fifth code indicating that a data transfer operation with at least one I/O port is to be performed, and data to be transferred; and writing the data to the I/O port.