DMA or Direct Memory Access is a method of transferring data between a device and memory without CPU involvement. This way is faster. Also, the CPU can do other computation in the mean-time.

There are 2 DMA controllers in a PC, each providing 4 channels. Since one channel is used to connect the master DMA controller to the slave DMA controller there are 4 8-bit and 3 16-bit available channels. One channel can be used by one hardware device only.

Also see This page at TechTarget.com

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by redxii edited by dbmaven
last modified: 2003-10-27 00:08:53