Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) (Understanding Expansion Buses)

Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)

The PCI bus specification was released in June 1992 as version 1.0 & since then have several upgrades. PCI bypasses the standard I/O bus, it uses the system bus to increase the bus clock speed and take full advantage of the CPU's data path.


The best features of the PCI slots are as bellow.

1. PCI cards do not have any jumpers, switches and are configured through the software.
2. PCI designs use special bus and chip set for advance bus mastering techniques. This allows to supports more then three PCI slots.
3. The PCI bus has its own set of Interrupts number for each slot, if a PC have more then four PCI slots, some of them will be sharing interrupts and IRQ,s