53C810

53C810 is the designation of a SCSI controller integrated circuit developed by LSI Logic in the mid-1990s. It is part of the 53C8xx family and was widely used in third-party SCSI host bus adapters to connect SCSI devices to computer systems. The chip provides an interface between a host system and SCSI devices and supports the standard SCSI-1 and SCSI-2 command sets.

Technically, the 53C810 includes an on‑chip DMA engine and SCSI protocol processing logic, allowing data transfers between system memory and the SCSI bus with minimal CPU intervention. It supports multiple targets on a single bus and relies on the host system's memory buffers. Depending on the board design, it communicated with the host via PCI or ISA interfaces and used standard SCSI arbitration and bus handshake mechanisms.

Applications and legacy: The 53C810 was embedded in a variety of SCSI host adapters used in personal computers, workstations, and some Unix and Mac environments during the 1990s. It contributed to affordable SCSI connectivity before being superseded by newer controller generations in the late 1990s and 2000s. In later years, LSI Logic and its successors continued to release improved SCSI controllers that gradually replaced the 53C810 in new designs.

The 53C810 is primarily of historical interest, illustrating the evolution of SCSI host controllers.