17 Facts About Mini PCI

Devices connected to the Mini PCI bus appear to a bus master to be connected directly to its own bus and are assigned addresses in the processor's address space.

Typical Mini PCI cards used in PCs include: network cards, sound cards, modems, extra ports such as Universal Serial Bus or serial, TV tuner cards and hard disk drive host adapters.

The first Mini PCI specification was developed by Intel, but subsequent development of the standard became the responsibility of the Mini PCI Special Interest Group .

Mini PCI was immediately put to use in servers, replacing Micro Channel architecture and Extended Industry Standard Architecture as the server expansion bus of choice.

In mainstream PCs, Mini PCI was slower to replace VLB, and did not gain significant market penetration until late 1994 in second-generation Pentium PCs.

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Outside the server market, the 64-bit version of plain Mini PCI remained rare in practice though, although it was used for example by all G3 and G4 Power Macintosh computers.

The Mini PCI bus includes four interrupt pins, later allow up to 8 Mini PCI devices share the same interrupt line in APIC systems, all of which are available to each device.

Later revisions of the Mini PCI specification add support for message-signaled interrupts.

Mini PCI Express does not have physical interrupt lines at all.

Typical Mini PCI cards have either one or two key notches, depending on their signaling voltage.

Mini PCI connector is defined as having 62 contacts on each side of the edge connector, but two or four of them are replaced by key notches, so a card has 60 or 58 contacts on each side.

The standard size for Mini PCI cards is approximately a quarter of their full-sized counterparts.

Many Mini PCI devices were developed such as Wi-Fi, Fast Ethernet, Bluetooth, modems, sound cards, cryptographic accelerators, SCSI, IDE–ATA, SATA controllers and combination cards.

Mini PCI has been superseded by the much narrower PCI Express Mini Card.

Each Mini PCI slot gets its own configuration space address range.

Mini PCI bus requires that every time the device driving a Mini PCI bus signal changes, one turnaround cycle must elapse between the time the one device stops driving the signal and the other device starts.

Mini PCI bus detects parity errors, but does not attempt to correct them by retrying operations; it is purely a failure indication.