5. Memory And Connectivity With PCMCIA And PC Cards, Continued

It is important to consider the bandwidth of such devices, i.e. the path inside the notebook.

The performance increase with the Cardbus 32bit marked the giant step from the old ISA world to the new PCI world. A modem card might not benefit from the 32bit access, but a 100Mb network card does.

Together with the 32bit transfer, the PC Card specification added the ZV (Zoomed Video) Port. The ZV Port is a point-to-point unidirectional video path from a PC Card to a graphics chip plus an audio chip.

With such a ZV Port PC Card you can add a camera or MPEG2-decoding (DVD-decoder cards) to your Notebook.

Recently Intel pushed forward with two new Standards for Mobile Computing, which are 'MiniPCI' for internal PCI cards and 'MDC' (Mobile Audio/Modem Daughter Card). PCI slots are too big for a notebook, but there is a need for optional features like Ethernet LAN, token ring LAN or other upgrades like e.g. Bluetooth. A MiniPCI card provides the flexibility needed to react to the market for such features. Usually, a built-in notebook modem is a proprietary design for a specific notebook model. With all the certification needed to support a modem around the world, it is a nightmare to use that certified design for one notebook modem model only. In this case the MiniPCI and MDC standards help at lot.