American Megatrends
Contents
Products
AMIKEY
AMIKEY (formerly trademarked, from 1994 to 2017) was American Megatrends’ series of keyboard controllers. Very little information on these products appears to remain. AMIKEY keyboard controller chips are marked “AMIKEY” in large letters, and examples of these chips can be readily looked up, for example this this unidentified motherboard. The firmware family is referred to as “Megakey” within the AMIKey-3 User's Guide.
AMIKey-3
AMIKey-3 is the only version for which any documentation has been found, in the form of the User Guide for the AMIKey-3 version designed to run on a Mitsubishi 38813 keyboard controller, for which no information can be found. The User Guide does not provide complete coverage and appears to make assumptions that the reader is familiar with the Mitsubishi chip that it runs on. In particular, the pinout is depicted but not explained. Whether AMIKEY-3 firmware was ever built for other keyboard controllers is not known, and no examples of this version can be found.
AMIKey-3 caters for both internal and external keyboards, for example laptops with a PS/2 port. The chip will communicate with the external keyboard over PS/2, and will also provide matrix scanning for the internal keyboard.
Contrary to expectation, AMIKey-3 supports hot-swap of external PS/2 peripherals.
Documentation
- AMIKey-3 38813 Keyboard Controller User's Guide (1997; scanned by Bitsavers)