Re: Large Motherboard.

["John M. Keefe, Jr." <keefe@magma.COM>]

On Thu, 12 Sep 1996, Vandana Lokeshwar wrote:

> I guess if it is for testing PCI boards, it is better to use a PCI extender
> instead.

Probably not... the original request was for "final testing after 
manufacturing".  We must assume that the board-level debug is already 
accomplished and that what is needed is functional and "burn-in" testing 
of finished goods.  In this case, an extender doesn't fill the bill, but 
a PCI expansion box would. 

Warning: shameless product plug follows ;-)

We have a PCI expansion box available that provides seven expansion slots
(six of them bus mastering) that a few of our customers are using for this
sort of test configuration (heck, we use it this way ourselves for our
enet and other PCI option card products).  We even have one customer that
has the board set bolted in an environmental rack so he can test his PCI
cards under extremes of heat/cold and humidity (the power supply in the
PeeCee he's using fails in the test chamber - while the one in our PCI 
expansion box doesn't!). 

>>I understand that it should contain one or more PCI-PCI bridges on board.

Our PCI expansion product employs 2 PCI-PCI bridges.  What's more, it's 
Spec. 2.0 compliant and has been tested with as many vendor's PCI cards 
as have shown up at the past two west-coast PCI Compliance Workshops.

Perhaps even better, the design requires no additional software or other 
system modifications. Your test host needs to have a BIOS that supports 
bridges and your device driver needs to "do the right thing" wrt bridges 
(and if both are V2.0 or V2.1 compliant that's almost a sure thing).

	/john
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John M. Keefe, Jr.                PCI Expansion Box Prod Mgr
Mesa Ridge Technologies -- MAGMA    email: keefe@magma.com
6725 Mesa Ridge Road #100,          Tel:   (619) 457-0750
San Diego, CA 92121                 Fax:   (619) 457-0798 
Have you seen our Web page yet? URL: <http://www.magma.com>
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