RE: regarding PCI/ISA hardware.

["Pete Cook" <pete.cook-at-alltracorp.com>]

The ISA bus is cheap - easy to interface with (i think a breadboard card can
still be had for less than $20) and doesn't require any special
engineering - and most of the older motheroards uesed it. While it might be
nice to use the latest whiz-bang computer for EMC, any design that will give
good performance on the older hardware may well be the better design. I am
using a comercial unit that required a hardware speedup because of very poor
system design - it uses up to 60% of the processor time for motion control.
Turns out you can break  it rather easily...

Pete
>
> 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.
>