The PCI-DMI32 Board provides a large on-board memory storage and high-speed, 32-bit parallel interface. It is capable of transmitting or receiving data transfers of up to 200 Mbytes per second on the cable.

The PCI-DMI32 Board includes up to 2GB of DRAM, a cable input/output controller, cable transceivers (differential, LVDS), and a DMA controller. The memory on the card is set to be either accessed from the PCI bus, or dedicated to the cable transfer. The on-board DRAM does not provide real-time access to the data from the PCI while a transfer is in progress. The DRAM is intended to be initialized over the PCI prior to the cable data transfer. When the transfer is enabled, the cable data will be either continuously transmitted from the on-board DRAM, or continuously received into the DRAM. Once the transfer is complete, the DRAM may be again accessed from the PCI bus.

The transfer controller is designed to allow several different transfer modes. In single transfer mode, a single buffer of data is transferred across the cable and then DRAM control is returned to the PCI bus. The single buffer may start at any address offset within the full 2GB DRAM space, and the transfer buffer size is also defined. In multi-buffer mode, multiple buffers may be transferred across the cable. In this manner, the user can define multiple buffers in the DRAM, which will then be transferred continuously to the cable when the transfer is enabled. On-board interrupts are defined to allow the user to update the start buffer address and buffer transfer size as soon as the transfer of one buffer begins. In this manner, the user can dynamically receive or transmit multiple buffers to/from the DRAM in one continuous transfer. Likewise, a single buffer can be transmitted continuously to the cable simply by not updating the start buffer address and buffer transfer size. This allows a continuous buffer of up to 2GB to be transmitted indefinitely on the cable.