Micro Channel architecture, or the Micro Channel bus, was a proprietary 16- or 32-bit

parallel computer bus introduced by IBM in 1987 which was used on PS/2 and other computers
until the mid-1990s. Its name is commonly abbreviated as "MCA", although not by IBM. In IBM
products, it superseded the ISA bus and was itself subsequently superseded by the PCI bus
architecture.

Contents
 1 Background
o 1.1 Technology
o 1.2 Market share
 2 Design
o 2.1 Overview
o 2.2 Data transmission
 3 Reception
 4 Cards
o 4.1 Sound cards
 5 See also
 6 References
 7 External links

Background
The development of Micro Channel was driven by both technical and business pressures.

Technology

The IBM AT bus, which later became known as the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus,
had a number of technical design limitations, including:

 A slow bus speed.

 A limited number of interrupts, fixed in hardware.
 A limited number of I/O device addresses, also fixed in hardware.
 Hardwired and complex configuration with no conflict resolution.
 Deep links to the architecture of the 80x86 chip family[1]

In addition, it suffered from other problems:

 Poor grounding and power distribution.

 Undocumented bus interface standards that varied between systems and manufacturers.

These limitations became more serious as the range of tasks and peripherals, and the number of
manufacturers for IBM PC-compatibles, grew. IBM was already investigating the use of RISC
processors in desktop machines, and could, in theory, save considerable money if a single well-
documented bus could be used across their entire computer lineup.