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expansion card
Sign in to saveAlso known as peripheral card, slot card, expansion board, adapter card, accessory card, computer expansion card, HAT (Hardware Attached on Top)(Raspberry Pi)
circuit board able to be connected to a computer system to add functionality
~18 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Example of a PCI digital I/O expansion card using a large square chip from PLX Technology to handle the PCI bus interface Altair 8800b from March 1976 with an 18-slot S-100 backplane which housed both the Intel 8080 mainboard and many expansion boards Rack of IBM Standard Modular System expansion cards in an IBM 1401 computer using a 16-pin gold plated edge connector first introduced in 1959 Configuration DIP switches in a 16-pin through-hole package as often found in ISA expansion cards from the 1980s
Thunderbolt 3 connector introduced by Intel in December 2015 multiplexes up to 4-lanes of PCIe 3.0 and 8-lanes of DisplayPort 1.2 and can support an external docking station housing one or more expansion cards with enough bandwidth to drive a mid-range GPU.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “expansion card” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.