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PC Card/PCMCIA/CardBus

PC Card Slot The popular PC Card slot or CardBus, known also as PCMCIA is a universal expansion slot, designed originally for memory cards.

The names are often used interchangeably what leads to many misunderstandings. The proper name for all versions of this popular interface is PC Card.

PC Card Thickness Versions

PC Cards comes in three types: Type I/II/III. These types mean thickness of card. Type I - 3.3mm, Type II - 5.0mm and Type III - 10.5mm. Because they differ only in thickness, a thinner card can be used in a thicker slot.

You can expect refurbished laptop you are going to buy to have Type II version of slot, as it is the most popular slot thickness. In fact you can rarely meet Type III cards that would demand a thicker slot.

PC Card Interface Releases

There are several releases of PC Card standards:


Release 1.0 - June 1990

The first release defined the 68-pin interface and Type I and Type II card form factors. This standard specified physical, electrical and logical requirements for memory cards only. As PCMCIA stands for "Personal Computer Memory Card International Association" that developed this standard, that's where a popular PCMCIA name comes from.


Releases 2.0, 2.01 and 2.1 - 1991 - 1994

These releases added dual voltage operation, PC CardATA, Type III card form factor, AIMS (Auto-Indexing Mass Storage) and also made some general improvements to the previous version. From 2.0 release PC Card officially gained status of universal interface. These versions of PC Card interface have all features of ISA bus plus "hot plug" and "plug & play" capabilities.


PC Card Standard - February 1995

This release added information to improve compatibility and added very important features such as:

  • 3.3V operation
  • DMA support
  • 32-bit CardBus bus mastering
This version of PC Card standard is widely known as CardBus. As the previous 16-bit release had most of ISA features, this specification has most of PCI features including 32-bit bus width and 33MHz operation that allows maximal transfer rates at 132MB/s level.

All CardBus hosts (e.g. PC Card ports in most of today laptops) support also previous 16-bit standard cards. However, if your laptop supports only 3.3V cards you won't be able to use 5V only, older products.

If you would like to know more go to: www.pcmcia.org.

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