PCI Slot Expansion

I want to design a pci board which will expand one pci slot through a pci-bridge and pci-local bus and get two slot. I wonder if there is any driver problem? say i plug a audio card into the expanded slot?

thanks

Hui

Reply to
Hui Li
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Depends upon your softwae. I'd expect it to work for most OSes.

It might not for an OS designed to run on small systems, say an OS for embedded systems. It might take a special configuration flag for the software to include support for the PCI Bridge.

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Reply to
Hal Murray

I am using windows 2000, the two PCI card I am about to use is a Display card and a FPGA based DSP card, they both have workable driver, what I wonder is if a PCI-Bridge based slot expansion card can make these two only ocupy one main PCI-bus slot, with out any change of driver.

Do you know if there are any product card can do this? or any available design for this?

Thanks

Hui

Reply to
Hui Li

This will work transparently without driver modification provided the driver makes the right OS/BIOS calls to find the device, etc.

TC

Reply to
TC

PCI bridges are mature technology. I would expect it to just work. I know next to nothing about MS software. There are, of course, many ways to screwup the software.

I think I have seen PCI expansion/extender cards (mostly for testing?) that contained a bridge chip. If you can find one of them it might let you test something close to your desired configuration.

Multiport Ethernet cards based on a normal ethernet chips behind a PCI bridge chip are popular. You might be able to borrow one for long enough to verify that your setup at least supports PCI bridges.

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Reply to
Hal Murray

It should work without any problem albeit performance might degrade somewhat.

There are tons of cards with bridges. One example is a Bittware Hammerhead DSP card. You can also find PMC carrier cards with bridges but to be able to use them you would need to have your 2 cards in the PMC form factor or use additional adapters. An example of such a card can be found here:

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/Mikhail

Reply to
MM

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