First post, by DerBaum
- Rank
- Oldbie
In industrial / professional computer applications you can sometimes find expansion slots that look like an ISA slot but are normally brown an deeper.
(Example picture shows a PISA SBC with a 14 slot backplane : 4 PCI, 2 PISA, 8 ISA)
The connector has two rows, where the upper row is normal ISA.
The connector is shaped that you can insert normal ISA cards in the PISA/EISA connector and it will work. The ISA card will not touch the lower row.
The confusing part is PISA and EISA use the same connector but do not share the same signals on the lower row of contacts.
EISA (Extended ISA) is an extension of the ISA bus. https://old.pinouts.ru/Slots/EISA_pinout.shtml
You can imagine EISA more like a VLB predecessor but combined into one slot and much slower.
EISA slots are normally found on mainboards and not on backplanes and used for add on cards like controller or graphics cards.
(Example EISA Network Card)
Source: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:EISA_network_card.jpg
When PISA was introduced in 1996, EISA already was old stuff
PISA is a combination of ISA and PCI in one slot. https://www.kontron.com/download/download?fil … f&product=87006
The Upper row is ISA, the lower row is PCI.
PISA is normally used on single board computers to get ISA and PCI through one connector into the backplane.
This allows the computers to be as short as an ISA slot.
You can also get a combination of ISA and PCI for single board computers that is called PICMG (1.0).
This combination of connectors looks a lot like VLB but it isnt.
The ISA connector and the PCI connector are in one row after each other.
(example shows a 12 slot backplane with 2 PICMG, 4 PCI, 6 ISA)
A PICMG (1.0) single board computer.
FCKGW-RHQQ2
