PCI Express

PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a computer expansion card standard designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X, and AGP bus standards. PCIe has numerous improvements over the aforementioned bus standards, including higher maximum system bus throughput, lower I/O pin count and smaller physical footprint, better performance-scaling for bus devices, a more detailed error detection and reporting mechanism, and native hot plug functionality. More recent revisions of the PCIe standard support hardware I/O virtualization.

The PCIe electrical interface is also used in a variety of other standards, most notably ExpressCard, a laptop expansion card interface.

Format specifications are maintained and developed by the PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group), a group of more than 900 companies that also maintain the Conventional PCI specifications. PCIe 3.0 is the latest standard for expansion cards that is available on mainstream personal computers.
Applications

PCI Express is used in consumer, server, and industrial applications, as a motherboard-level interconnect (to link motherboard-mounted peripherals), a passive backplane interconnect and as an expansion card interface for add-in boards.

In virtually all modern PCs, from consumer laptops and desktops to enterprise data servers, the PCIe bus serves as the primary motherboard-level interconnect, connecting the host system processor with both integrated-peripherals (surface mounted ICs) and add-on peripherals (expansion cards.) In most of these systems, the PCIe bus co-exists with 1 or more legacy PCI busses, for backward compatibility with the large body of legacy PCI peripherals.

August 9, 2011

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