New PCI Express roadmap adopted for PC/104

28 May 2008 News

The PC/104 Embedded Consortium has adopted a consolidated and consistent stackable PCI Express roadmap for the PC/104 industry. With overwhelming positive support, the voting members adopted the PCI/104-Express and PCIe/104 specification to address the needs of current and future stackable embedded PC applications.

The adoption of the specifications culminates the effort of the consortium's technical committee which attracted over 22 consortium members over the last year to debate the merits of various configurations and work out the plethora of technical challenges uniquely faced by a stackable PCI Express architecture.

The specification builds on the foundation of following the PC market as defined by the major chip manufacturers. This began with the ISA bus (PC/104), then the ISA and PCI buses together (PC/104-Plus), then the PCI bus only (PCI/104), and then the PCI and PCI Express buses together (PCI/104-Express).

For additional room on a module, the PCIe/104 removes the PCI bus. This roadmap allows maximum use and leveraging of the vast resources and economies of scale of the PC community in both hardware and software development. It also allows maximum backward compatibility with minimal stacking overhead, if any, and allows future bus advancements as technologies develop and mature.

This new stackable PCI Express bus can be immediately incorporated across the Consortium's 104, EPIC and EBX form factors.

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