Scott P. Dolan wrote:

"I need some reasons to tell sales that PCI is not the solutions. I don't want to creat a PCI card, the sales department wants us to create a PCI card. I need to convince that the PCI card is not a solution."

Here's some good responses:

"Who will write the Windows device driver for the PCI card?"

"The Xilinx/Altera/Whatever PCI Core is $5K, plus we need their development tools for another $5K. Or we could spend X months developing our own PCI interface but we still need the $5K for the tools."

"A PCI bus analyzer costs $5K and we will absolutely need one."

"Most of the PCI interface chips come in BGA packages. Can we handle BGAs?"

I would imagine that if the answer to the first question is "huh?" then the remaining questions are irrelevant.

The truth is that developing a PCI device actually isn't all that hard. However, the first design WILL be difficult as you scale the learning curve. And you still need someone to write that device driver.

Anyways, doesn't Black Box or Sealevel or somebody already make a PCI card with four or eight 485 ports on it?

--a