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Bridge to attach a PCI device to a PC-card socket?

He really means CardBus, not PCMCIA. Any contemporary laptop PC supports both through the same connector (through some clever mass-pin-redefinition for the newer CardBus standard), so it's not too surprising that people confuse the two.

I believe that CardBus 'cards' are supposed to provide some additional data in their configuration spaces relative to power control that PCI cards don't, but I imagine you can get by without it (PCs being almost expected to 'work' even with poorly designed hardware and all... :-) ).

A quick Google search turns up this

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Not cheap, but seems like it'd get the job done.

---Joel Kolstad

Reply to
Joel Kolstad
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Aaron, I question your statement that PCMCIA cards are anything like the PCI bus. Just compare the pin outs.

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There are no converters such as you want that I'm aware of.

Thanks, Steve

Reply to
Steve

Hi all.

I understand that PC[MCIA] Cards are basically an extension of the PCI bus. Therefore, I wonder if it is possible to make a bridge board that allows a PCI card to be "plugged into" a PC-Card socket.

Normally of course, you go the other way: providing a PC-Card socket on a PCI card. There's lots of those available off the shelf.

The reason being that we have a custom PCI card, that's not worth redesigning to fit into PCCard, but it would be nice to be able to attach it that way for marketing demos, etc. It doesn't matter if the interface is a bit ugly, e.g needing external power.

Thanks for your thoughts!

Aaron

Reply to
Aaron Lawrence

Learn something new everyday. I did some work with PCMCIA on a 683xx MCU system more years ago than I'd like to mention and cPCI work more recently, and didn't think they were at all related. Confirming your clarification, I found this pinout at

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Cardbus is indeed not your father's PCMCIA.

I am curious about the adapter you point out. Ideally the adapter adds another PCI bus and bridge to the system, but I wonder how (non?) transparently it allows access to the PCI card. My guess is the PCI to Cardbus to PCI bridging may not be seen by the initial BIOS PCI bus scan of the laptop. Presumably there are some "Patented MAGMA PCI Expansion Technology" registers that must be banged to initialize it and work some magic to map PCI through the Cardbus.... well maybe the Cardbus adapter adds a BIOS extension to deal with that, too. Ultimately, I assume in order for this to be useful, one should not have to rewrite their PCI card drivers. Neat. Still, there must be some limits; but it "ain't" bandwidth, as they claim plenty 'o that...

Thanks, Steve

Reply to
Steve

Hi Joel,

That's the perfect device! I couldn't th> He really means CardBus, not PCMCIA. Any contemporary laptop PC supports

Thanks for the clarification :)

Regards

Aaron

Reply to
Aaron Lawrence

Hi Joel,

That's the perfect device! I couldn't th> He really means CardBus, not PCMCIA. Any contemporary laptop PC supports

Thanks for the clarification :)

Regards

Aaron

Reply to
Aaron Lawrence

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