National Instruments

This paper looks at the success of the widely adopted PCI bus and describes a higher-performance next generation of I/O interconnect technology—PCI Express—that will serve as a standard local I/O bus for a wide variety of future computing platforms. The paper also offers a technical overview of the evolution of PC buses, the physical and software layers of PCI Express, the benefits of PCI Express, and the implications this exciting new technology will have on measurement and automation systems.