Communication Series P5 : Legacy PCI Expansion bus architecture

This course provides VLSI engineers with a complete foundation in the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) standard, beginning with the role of PCI in system design and comparisons between system and expansion buses, progressing through the evolution from ISA to PCI with emphasis on plug-and-play concepts and configuration space, exploring memory and I/O addressing models, and moving into arbitration and bus mastering where students will study the arbiter’s function, request–grant protocols, and their Verilog implementation, before diving into PCI interface signals including CLK, RST, AD, C/BE, PAR, FRAME, DEVSEL, IRDY, TRDY, and byte enable, with detailed analysis of address and data phases, wait states, and command usage, followed by complete transaction flows where both master-initiated (normal end, latency, abort) and target-initiated (delayed transaction, disconnect with or without data, target abort) endings are covered, then advancing into PCI configuration space with IDSEL signaling, configuration frames (Type 0 and Type 1), CPU access mechanisms, and register structures such as command, status, latency timer, and BARs, culminating in practical Verilog-based construction of nano-configuration space and target design across multiple steps, enabling learners to not only understand PCI theory but also implement arbiters, masters, targets, and configuration logic in Verilog for real-world VLSI applications