PCI Politics (was RE: why Target cannot change its mind)

[Alan Deikman <Alan.Deikman@znyx.com>]

> > I would love to hear an
> > example of something put into the PCI spec. (or some other major industry
> > spec. I guess) that was put there for the purpose of making it difficult
> > for small companies to compete.
>
>PCI is a prime example.  It was specifically designed to require an ASIC to
>interface to.  ASICs cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to make,
>and as such, prohibit small companies from doing them.
>
>I wrote, what I believe was, the first PCI implementation in an FPGA, which,
>at the time, was quite a feat...since the FPGAs, without all sorts of
>tricks, were not very PCI compliant.
>
>Obviously, FPGAs, being much more compliant, and with cores, now level the
>playing field to some degree.

Man, history and religion.  All we need now is a good bottle of
vodka, and we can keep this going on forever.

The idea that PCI was made ASIC-centric to keep little companies
out of the game is a novel, to say the least, idea.  PCI was
invented to be a chip-to-chip protocol to begin with.  The idea
was that chip designers between the principals (Digital, Intel,
and NCR, if I recall) would not have to be re-inventing 32-bit
busses all the time when they did their chip projects.

The connector part of the specification was added later, along
with interrupts and other junk.  Most of the world never saw
PCI before rev 2.0, which had that stuff added.

Do you have any idea of how to get the signaling of PCI
at 33MHz (make it easy -- ignore 66MHz) to work without the
ASIC-based drivers we all use?  The days of just slapping
some CMOS gates on a connector and whomping up a new
peripheral board are long gone, my friend.  Where have you
been?

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Alan Deikman        | 510 249 0800 Voice
ZNYX Networks, Inc. | 603 843 5867 FAX