General Purpose Input/Output
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GPIO is an acronym for General Purpose Input/Output and is used in embedded electronics field. GPIO devices provide a set of IO ports which can be configured for either input or output. In addition GPIO chips may support the common bus protocols like I²C, SPI and SMBus serial buses. In this case the GPIO chips turn out to be a cheaper solution than using a microcontroller for this purpose. Development Kits for the Playstation 3 had a set of 8 switches labelled GPI and GPO, which had people confused for a while, something compounded by the resemblance to GP1 and GP0. SGPIO stands for Serial GPIO.
