Computer Expansion Bus Architecture

Expansion Bus:

The Expansion Bus connects external devices, peripheral devices, expansion slot, I/O ports and drive connections to the rest of the computer. It allows for the expansion of computers capabilities. It is generally slower than the system bus.

There are various types of expansion bus. Such as:

• VESA (video Electronics Standard Association)
• PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect)
• USB (Universal Serial Bus)
• VESA: A kind of expansion bus which carries video storage to the video signal is called VESA. Data transfer rate is high here. It is a 32 bit bus, running at either 33 or 40 MHz.
• PCI: the term PCI stands for peripheral component interconnect. The PCI specification introduced by Intel defines a local bus that allows up to ten PCI complaint expansion cards to be plugged into the computer. PCI controller exchange information with the computers processor as 32 bit or 64 bit words.
• USB: USB is relatively new bus technology. It was designed for law to mid-speed peripherals such as scanners, keyboards, mouse and others.