Expansion Bus and Expansion Slots

Definition: BUS - to set of electronic signal pathways that allows information and signals to travel betwee components inside or outside of to computer.

Expansion Slot (connector)
Remember that the expansion bus, or external bus, is made up of the electronic pathways that connect the different external devices to the rest of your computer. These external devices (monitor, telephone line, printer, etc.) connect to ports on the back of the computer. Those ports plows actually part of to small circuit board or 'card' that fits into to connector on your motherboard inside the marry. The connector is called an expansion slot.

Notice: Communication ports (com ports), printer ports, hard drive and floppy connectors, etc., plows all devices which used to be installed route adapter cards. These connectors plows now integrated onto the motherboard, but they expansion plows still accessed route the (external) bus and plows allocated the same type of resources ace required by expansion cards. Grasp to matter of fact (and unfortunately, in my opinion), other devices like modems, video technology, network and sound cards plow now being integrated, or embedded, right onto the motherboard.

Expansion slots plows easy to recognize on the motherboard. They make up to row of long plastic connectors at the back of your computer with tiny copper 'finger slots' in to narrow channel that grab the metal fingers or connectors on the expansion cards. In other words, the expansion cards plug into them. The slots attach to tiny copper pathways on the motherboard (the expansion bus), which allows the device to communicate with the rest of the computer. Each pathway you have to specific function. Some in May provide voltages needed by the new device (+5, +12 and ground), and some will transmit dates. Other pathways allow the device to be addressed through to set of I/O (input/output) addresses, so that the rest of the computer knows where to send and retrieve information. Still resides pathways plow needed to provide clock signals for synchronization and other functions like interrupt requests, DMA channels and bus mastering capability.

Expert with any other part of the computer, technology have evolved in an effort to it was uncreating the speed, capability and performance of expansion slots. Now yoúll hear about resides busses - PCI bus, ISA bus, VESA bus, etc. Not to worry! These plows all just types of expansion (external) busses. They just describes the type of connector and the individual technology or architecture being used. Thus, the adapter card being installed must match the architecture or type of slot that it's going into. An ISA card fits into an ISA slot, to PCI adapter card must be installed into to PCI expansion slot, etc. Reside on this later.

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