A PCI based DSNIC board[3] has been developed jointly between CERN and INFN[11]. The wide acceptance of the PCI bus standard allows the board to support many present and future processors.
The board, see Figure 1, contains the AMCC 5933 PCI interface chip, two SGS Thompson C101 parallel to serial DS link interfaces[16], 256 Kbytes RAM, and the Altera FLEX 10K50 Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The spare pins of the FPGA are brought out to headers to allow hardware extensions, e.g., via a daughter board. The flexibility of the FPGA allows part of the communication functionality to be off-loaded to the board; this functionality is thus spread over the board's firmware and the controlling software, i.e., the driver, executed by the host CPU.