Advance PCI technology with the introduction of the PCI Express Card. The PCI Express is the new standard serial connectivity card in PCI technology and the successor for server- and client-system I/O interconnects.

In addition to the bus technology upgrades, such as faster speeds and deeper FIFO rates, the PCI Express Card touts many advantages over the traditional PCI card including point-to-point link dedicated to each device, instead of PCI shared bus; lower latency in server architectures due to a more direct connection to the chip set; small connectors with easier implementation for system designers and advanced features via isochronous channels for guaranteed bandwidth delivery, advanced power management and hot swap support.

PCI Express Technology
The PCI Express Cards are available in 2, 4 or 6 port serial card configurations and offer high-speed, serial I/O bus that maintains backward compatibility with PCI applications and drivers. The layered architecture supports existing PCI applications and drivers by maintaining compatibility with existing PCI model. Defined by high performance, scalable, serial bus, the PCI Express card is dedicated to the device while multiple PCI Express devices can be active without interfering with each other.

SuperLogics also offers 2 port parallel cards; 2 and 4 port serial/parallel I/O cards and PCI Express to ExpressCard converters.

Advanced features
As client system boards migrate from the PCI connector to the PCI Express connector, SuperLogics' PCI Express Card maximizes advanced features such as:

• Advanced power management
• Support for real-time data traffic
• Hot plug and hot swap
• Data integrity and error handling

PCI Express vs. Universal PCI
Although PCI and UPCI Cards can be used in a variety of platforms, the PCI Express reflects an industry trend to replace legacy shared parallel buses with high-speed serial buses. They both have the same dimensions and are equipped with rear brackets, the difference lies in the I/O connectors. PCI Express has 36 pins versus the 120 pins on a standard PCI connector.