Other PCI Card

The Peripheral Component Interconnect, or PCI Standard (in practice almost always shortened to PCI) specifies a computer bus for attaching peripheral devices to a computer motherboard. These devices can take any one of the following forms: more...

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An integrated circuit fitted onto the motherboard itself, called a planar device in the PCI specification.; An expansion card that fits in sockets.;

The PCI bus is common in modern PCs, where it has displaced ISA and VESA Local Bus as the standard expansion bus, but it also appears in many other computer types. The bus will eventually be succeeded by PCI Express, which is standard in most new computers, and other technologies.

The PCI specification covers the physical size of the bus (including wire spacing), electrical characteristics, bus timing, and protocols. The specification can be purchased from the PCI Special Interest Group (PCISIG).

History

Work on PCI began at Intel's Architecture Lab circa 1990. PCI 1.0, which was merely a component-level specification, was released on June 22, 1992. PCI 2.0, which was the first to establish standards for the connector and motherboard slot, was released on April 30, 1993. PCI 2.1 was released on June 1, 1995.

PCI was immediately put to use in servers, replacing MCA and EISA as the server expansion bus of choice. In mainstream PCs, PCI was slower to replace VESA Local Bus (VLB), and did not gain significant market penetration until late 1994 in second-generation Pentium PCs. By 1996 VLB was all but extinct, and manufacturers had adopted PCI even for 486 computers. EISA continued to be used alongside PCI through 2000. Apple Computer adopted PCI for professional Power Macintosh computers (replacing NuBus) in mid-1995, and the consumer Performa product line (replacing LC PDS) in mid-1996.

Later revisions of PCI added new features and performance improvements, including a 66 MHz 3.3 V standard and 133 MHz PCI-X, and the adaptation of PCI signaling to other form factors. Both PCI-X 1.0b and PCI-X 2.0 are backward compatible with PCI standards. With the introduction of the serial PCI Express standard in 2004, motherboard manufacturers have included progressively fewer PCI expansion slots in favor of the new standard. Although it is still common to see both interfaces implemented side-by-side, traditional PCI is likely to slowly die out in coming years.

The system firmware examines each device's PCI Configuration Space and allocates resources. Each device can request up to six areas of memory space or I/O port space.

They can also have an optional ROM that can contain executable x86 or PA-RISC code, Open Firmware or an EFI driver.

In a typical system, the operating system queries all PCI buses at startup time to find out what devices are present and what system resources (memory, interrupt lines, etc.) each needs. It then allocates the resources and tells each device what its allocation is.

Read more at Wikipedia.org