The PCI (peripheral component interconnect) bus is an integral part of today's Pentium class high-performance personal computer systems.
Conceived and designed as a way to give peripheral components higher bandwidth access to the host processor in a PC, the PCI bus is a board-level expansion standard with important benefits to anyone whose work involves PC-based data acquisition.
In replacing the ageing 3 to 5 MB/s ISA (industry standard architecture) expansion bus, the PCI bus broke open the bandwidth bottleneck by providing a 132 MB/s (theoretical), 95 MB (typical) burst-rate highway.
In addition to its higher bandwidth, the PCI bus features master/slave operation to reduce latency and offload the host CPU. Other advantages include plug-and-play auto configuration to simplify installation; processor and platform independence, which lets designers easily develop PCI peripherals to run on platforms other than the Pentium PC; and a specified migration path to 3,3 V which simplifies the design of portable systems.
For data acquisition, the increased bandwidth of the PCI bus allows simultaneous, realtime gathering of gap-free analog and digital input data, along with outputs for analog stimuli and digital control. Data acquisition boards built for the PCI bus can feed acquired data directly to the PC's memory, minimising the need for on-board memory. Unlike ISA boards, which run the risk of overflowing data because they need a large onboard memory buffer, PCI data acquisition boards do not leave gaps in the acquired data. In other words, PCI boards do not lose data like ISA boards can if the bus does not respond fast enough to the board's request to transfer data.
High bandwidth also ensures gap-free transfer by allowing several subsystems to be active simultaneously rather than sequentially.
PCI has replaced ISA as the bus of choice in new desktop and industrial PCs. With the PCI bus, high-performance, low-cost and convenient PC-based data acquisition solutions are at hand.
Data Translation is represented in South Africa by Designs Unique.
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