The Local area networks based on token-bus standard have received increasing attention during the last few years in both the industrial automation and process control fields. A token bus control hardware system suitable for real-time communications with bounded transmmission delay as required in most time-critical applications is designed and implemented. In the communication hardware, we implement the media access control layer of the IEEE 802.4 token bus protocol. The implemented hardware provides the processing power and memory suitable for the processing activities of ISO/OSI protocol layers 2 through 7 on a single board. Providing intelligence to this hardware makes it possible to offload most protocol processing activities from the host and in turn, overall system performance is enhanced in large extent.