PCI/104-Express
The PCI/104-Express™ specification establishes a standard to use the high-speed PCI Express bus in embedded applications. It was developed by the PC/104 Consortium and adopted by member vote in March 2008. PCI Express was chosen because of its market adoption, performance, scalability, and growing silicon availability worldwide. It provides a new high-performance physical interface while retaining software compatibility with the existing PCI infrastructure. Incorporating the PCI Express bus within the industry proven PC/104 architecture brings many advantages for embedded applications including fast data transfer, low cost due to PC/104’s unique self-stacking bus , high reliability due to PC/104’s inherent ruggedness, and long-term sustainability. Specification Overview. There are two versions of the specification that are complementary. The main difference is that Type 2 replaces the PCI Express x16 link with SATA, USB 3.0, LPC, and RTC battery. Both Type 1 and Type 2 have this common feature set and pin assignments: Type 1 has the common feature set plus: Type 2 has the common feature set plus: