Traveling in the PCI Express Lane

摘要

To win a trade-magazine design challenge, Ted needed to list 15 high-speed buses in order of popularity. He had just started when Joanne dropped by. She explained that specific application requirements, speed, compatibility with legacy systems, shared or switched access, serial vs. parallel architecture, scalability, breadth of industry support, standardization status, and cost all contribute to bus adoption. Ted made another pot of coffee. The recently introduced PCI Express bus satisfies most of Joanne's concerns as a successor to the decade-old peripheral component interconnect (PCI) bus. The PCI bus originally was used to interconnect chips on PCBs and appeared as a PC bus about 1994. It is a synchronous, 32-b, multiplexed parallel bus with accompanying control, arbitration, and interrupt signals.