[rescue] Re: rescue Digest, Vol 5, Issue 90

[Michael Thompson]

>Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2003 17:16:35 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Michael Dombrowski <ab1244 at yahoo.com>
>Subject: [rescue] CompactPCI Questions
>
>Hello All,
>   I have a lead on some CompactPCI equipment but have
>no experience with running it. Can you stick more than
>one system in a cPCI chassis? Or is it just designed
>for one controller board and many different add-in
>cards? Any good cPCI references?
>
>Thanks
>Mike

The PCI bus in a CompactPCI backplane is just like the PCI bus in a Sun (or
PC) system. There is one board (System Device) on the bus that provides the
33/66 Mhz clock to the slave devices and does the bus arbitration. Some
CPCI CPU boards are capable of running as a slave device and are used as
communications or I/O processors. There are some CPCI variants with dual
PCI busses, bridges and very special software that allow redundant CPUs. We
make CPCI chassis with more than one PCI bus in the backplane. These
systems are still restricted to one System Device per PCI bus though. The
CPCI specifications are available from http://www.picmg.org.

Michael Thompson
E-Mail: M_Thompson at IDS.net