Negotiation and U.S. ratification. Back row, left to right: Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, U.S. President George H. W. Bush, and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, at the initialing of the draft North American Free Trade Agreement in October 1992.
Direct memory access. Direct memory access (DMA) is a feature of computer systems that allows certain hardware subsystems to access main system memory (RAM), independent of the central processing unit (CPU).
Short for Direct Memory Access, DMA is a feature of some computer bus architectures that allows data to be sent from a storage device to memory without using the CPU. Because DMA frees the processor from involvement in the transfer process, it tends to be faster than PIO mode.