Everything about Expansion Card totally explained
An
expansion card (also
expansion board,
adapter card or
accessory card) in
computing is a
printed circuit board that can be inserted into an expansion slot of a
computer motherboard to add additional functionality to a computer system.
One edge of the expansion card holds the contacts (the
edge connector) that fit exactly into the slot. They establish the electrical contact between the electronics (mostly
integrated circuits) on the card and on the motherboard.
Connectors mounted on the bracket allow the connection of external devices to the card. Depending on the
form factor of the motherboard and case, around one to seven expansion cards can be added to a computer system. There are also other factors involved in expansion card capacity. For example, some expansion cards need two slots like some
NVidia GeForce FX and newer GeForce graphics cards and there's often a space left to aid cooling on some high-end cards.
Some cards are "low-profile" cards, meaning that they take up little physical space. (There is a "low profile PCI card" standard
(External Link
) (External Link) that specifies a much smaller bracket and board area). The group of expansion cards that are used for external connectivity, such as a
network,
SAN or
modem card, are commonly referred to as
input/output cards (or
I/O cards).
Dimensions for the metal plate on the expansion card is 120mm wide, and 18mm high.
History of the expansion card
The first
microcomputer to feature a slot-type expansion card bus was the
Altair 8800, developed 1974-1975. Initially, implementations of this bus were proprietary (such as the
Apple II and
Macintosh), but by 1982 manufacturers of
Intel 8080/
Zilog Z80-based computers running
CP/M had settled around the
S-100 standard.
IBM introduced the XT bus, with the first
IBM PC in 1981; it was then called the PC bus, as the IBM XT, using the same bus (with slight exception,) wasn't to be introduced until 1983. XT (a.k.a. 8-bit ISA) was replaced with ISA (a.k.a. 16-bit ISA,) originally known as AT bus, in 1984. IBM's
MCA bus, developed for the PS/2 in 1987, was a competitor to ISA, also their design, but fell out of favor due to the ISA's industry-wide acceptance and IBM's closed licensing of MCA. EISA, the 16-bit extended version of ISA championed by Compaq, was common on PC motherboards until 1997, when Microsoft declared it a "legacy" subsystem in the
PC 97 industry white-paper.
VESA Local Bus, an early 1990s expansion bus that was inherently tied to the 80486
CPU, became obsolete (along with the processor) when Intel launched the
Pentium CPU in 1993.
The
PCI bus was introduced in 1991 as replacement for ISA. The standard (now at version 3.0) is found on PC motherboards to this day.
Intel introduced the
AGP bus in 1997 as a dedicated video acceleration solution. Though termed a bus, AGP supports only a single card at a time. From 2005 PCI-Express has been replacing both PCI and AGP. This standard, approved
[bywho?] in 2004, implements the logical PCI protocol over a serial communication interface.
After the S-100 bus, this article above mentions only buses used on IBM-compatible/Windows-Intel PCs. Most other computer lines that were not IBM compatible, including those from
Tandy,
Commodore,
Amiga, and
Atari, offered their own expansion buses. Even many video game consoles, such as the
Sega Genesis, included expansion buses; at least in the case of the Genesis, the expansion bus was proprietary, and in fact the cartridge slots of many cartridge based consoles (not including the
Atari 2600) would qualify as expansion buses, as they exposed both read and write capabilities of the system's internal bus. However, the expansion modules attached to these interfaces, though functionally the same as expansion cards, are not technically expansion cards, due to their physical form.
For their
1000 EX and
1000 HX models, Tandy Computer designed the PLUS expansion interface, an adaptation of the XT-bus supporting cards of a smaller form factor. Because it's electrically compatible with the XT bus (a.k.a. 8-bit ISA or XT-ISA,) a passive adapter can be made to connect XT cards to a PLUS expansion connector. Another feature of PLUS cards is that they're stackable. Another bus that offered stackable expansion modules was the "sidecar" bus used by the IBM
PCjr. This may have been electrically the same as or similar to the XT bus; it most certainly had some similarities since both essentially exposed the 8088 CPU's address and data buses, with some buffering and latching, the addition of
interrupts and
DMA provided by Intel add-on chips, and a few system
fault detection lines (Power Good, Memory Check, I/O Channel Check.) Again, PCjr sidecars are not technically expansion cards, but expansion modules, with the only difference being that the sidecar is an expansion card enclosed in a plastic box (with holes exposing the connectors.)
Expansion slot standards
Expansion card types
Graphics cards
Sound cards
Network cards
TV tuner cards
Video processing expansion cards
Modems
Host adapters such as SCSI and RAID controllers.
POST cards
BIOS Expansion ROM cards
Physics cards, only recently became commercially available.
Disk controller cards (for fixed- or removable-media drives)
Interface adapter cards, including parallel port cards, serial port cards, multi-I/O cards, USB port cards, and proprietary interface cards.
RAM disks, for example i-RAM
Memory expansion cards (legacy)
Hard disk cards (legacy)
Clock/calendar cards (legacy)
Security device cards
Radio tuner cardsFurther Information
Get more info on 'Expansion Card'.
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