The last time I designed a board to fit into a PC was in the early
1980s, and it used the original 8-bit ISA bus. Now we're looking at designing a board for the conventional PCI bus.If we go ahead and do the product, we will buy the official standards documents from PCI-SIG, but for the moment I'm hoping somebody here might be able to answer one question.
I am looking to combine the functionality of two PCI bus boards onto one physical PCI board. This would allow us to reduce board cost, and change the embedded PC from a normal motherboard which must be changed frequently to a long-life embedded form factor like Mini-ITX, which has only one PCI slot.
It would be a plus if the new board could be made transparent to the OS, drivers, and application running on the embedded PC.
So what I really want to know is if it is possible to have a physical PCI board with the appropriate logic respond as two different boards. In other words, can I make a PCI board with a serial and a parallel section, that appears to the processor as though it were two separate boards, depending on which section the processor accesses at any give time?
I know this would have been simple to do on an ISA board, does anyone know if it's possible for PCI?