Re: regarding PCI/ISA hardware.

[Paul <paul.corner-at-tesco.net>]

Hi Fred

Looking at suitable chips for bridging the gap between PCI and ISA designs, I 
came across a PLX9052 - http://www.plxtech.com
With a unit price of $18 (not sure what quantity), it may well be a cheap 
solution to the problem of interfacing to the PCI bus.

I'm not sure the ISA bus should be laid to rest just yet - There is still a 
strong demand for ISA boards and backplanes from certain sectors of industry.

Regards, Paul.


On Monday 11 February 2002 12:25 pm, Fred Herenius wrote:

> > ISA has reached the end of its life and should be quietly buried.
>
> Indeed. No flowers, no funeral. Put it in a massgrave next to its buddy
> DOS.
>
> > Sure its easy to design an isa card. but pci is not a lot harder.
> > A remote box , say with ethernet and a socket interface makes sense.
> > Rabbits and other things can support ethernet with just a couple of
> > chips.
>
> I don't fully agree with PCI being only a bit harder than ISA. For ISA you
> can get away with basically a few address decoders + application specific
> ICs. For PCI you need a bit more. OK, I'll admit this is working knowledge
> from a few years back when I really looked into it. Are there any cheap
> readily available bridges out there? If so, please kindly point me in the
> right direction, because I'm always looking for techniques to be added to
> my toolkit. Easiest still would seem to be an fpga + selecting the right
> free pci ip.