Controller (hardware)
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As Controller (English for control unit or controller ) electronic units are computer - Hardware designates that control certain operations. If these units only consist of an integrated circuit , they are usually called microcontrollers .
Controllers have a multitude of tasks in the computer: They take over the processing of interrupt requests (IRQs), the keyboard input or the control of access to the hard disk (see e.g. ST506 interface ).
In common parlance, controllers or components, often also called adapters , usually designate an interface, e.g. For example, the network controller / adapter refers to the component that connects a PC to a network and the graphic controller / adapter refers to the component that connects the PC to any image output device.
In common parlance , components for hard disk connection, called controllers (e.g. IDE controllers ) are nowadays mostly host bus adapters . Since Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) became widespread in the 1980s, hard disk controllers have been housed in the hard disk itself; for SCSI hard drives this was true from the start anyway.
In PCs , controllers are located on plug-in cards or on the main board of the computer itself. Since the keyboard controller is one of the most basic functions of the computer, it is always on the motherboard.
Keyboard controller and connector on an AT motherboard
SCSI-3 “controller” (actually a host bus adapter ) with a 50-pin cable
