Mother Board Fundamentals

What is a Mother Board?

Mother Board is a collection of devices

It controls the flow of data and operating electricity for all the primary components in
a PC

Containing the circuitry for the central processing unit, keyboard, mouse and
monitor, together with slots for other devices (together on one large circuit
board).

Ex: The CPU, memory, graphics adapter and sound card etc...

It handles system resources (IRQ lines, DMA channels, I/O locations), as well as core
components like the CPU, and all system memory.
The motherboard is also sometimes referred to as the Main Board.

The PCB
A motherboard is a multi-layered Printed Circuit Board.
some layers of a board can carry data for the BIOS,Processor and memory buses.
Other layers carry voltage and ground returns without the paths short-circuiting
at intersections.
Copper circuit paths called traces that resemble a complicated road map carry signals and
voltages across the motherboard.
The insulated layers are manufactured into one complete, complex sandwich.
Chips and sockets are soldered onto the motherboard.

Traces (Data Paths)

Desktop Mother Board

Mother Board Components

IDE Connector
SATA Connector
Floppy Drive Connector
ATX Power Connector
Super IO Chip
DIMM Memory Slots
CPU Fan Connector
CPU Fan & Heat sink Mount
CPU Socket
Connectors for Integrated Peripherals
PCI Express Slot
Integrated Ethernet Chip
Integrated Audio Codec Chip
PCI Slot
Integrated graphics processor
CMOS Backup Battery

South Bridge
BIOS Flash Chip

Mother Board Block Diagram

North Bridge
The Northbridge handles all the data flows to and from the main memory, plus all the CPU
transactions.
Connects between the high-speed processor bus and the slower AGP and PCI busses.

South Bridge
The South Bridge is the bridge between the PCI bus and the even
slower ISA bus.
The South-bridge handles the data for most of the I/O ports (PCI,
ISA, IDE, USB, etc)

BIOS CHIP
A computer needs a semi-permanent way of keeping some start-up data
e.g. the current time, the no. of hard disks the data may need to be
updated/changed.
BIOS software is stored on a non-volatile ROM chip (also called CMOS Memory)
In modern PCs the BIOS is stored in rewritable memory, allowing the contents to
be replaced or 'rewritten'( to fix bugs or provide improved performance or to
support newer hardware, or a re-flashing operation might be needed to fix a
damaged BIOS).
A file containing such contents is sometimes termed as ' BIOS image'.

CMOS Memory

the battery

Super I/O
By combining many functions in a single chip, the number of parts
needed on a motherboard is reduced, thus reducing the cost of
production.
The Super I/O is a separate chip attached to the ISA bus that is really not
considered part of the chip-set and often comes from a third party.
A super I/O chip combines interfaces for a variety of low-bandwidth devices.
The functions provided usually include:

A floppy disk controller

A parallel port (commonly used for printers)
One or more serial ports
A keyboard and mouse interface.
Temperature sensor and fan speed monitoring.
A game port or an infrared port.

CPU Socket Connectors

CPU socket or CPU slot is a mechanical component

It provides mechanical and electrical connections between a device (usually a

microprocessor) and a printed circuit board (PCB).
Allows easy swapping of components

AMD Socket Connectors

Pentium Socket Connectors

DIMM Memory & DIMM Slots

A DIMM or dual in-line memory module, comprises a series of dynamic random access
memory integrated circuits.
DIMMs began to replace SIMMs (single in-line memory modules)
The main difference between SIMMs and DIMMs is that DIMMs have separate electrical contacts
on each side of the module.
The contacts on SIMMs on both sides are redundant.
Another difference is that standard SIMMs have a 32-bit data path,
DIMMs have a 64-bit data path

3 SDRAM DIMM
slots

ATX power supply connector

The ATX specification requires the power supply to produce three main outputs
+3.3 V, +5 V and +12 V.
Originally the motherboard was powered by one 20-pin connector.
An ATX power supply provides a 4-pin auxiliary connector providing
additional power to the CPU, and a main 24-pin power supply
connector, an extension of the original 20-pin version.

Processor
The central processing unit (CPU) is the portion of a computer system that carries out the
instructions of a computer program, and is the primary element carrying out the functions of
the computer or other processing device.

An Intel 80486DX2 CPU from

above

An Intel 80486DX2 from

below

SATA Connector

Serial ATA (SATA or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) is a computer bus interface for
connecting host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives and optical drives.
Serial ATA was designed to replace the older ATA (AT Attachment) standard (also known as EIDE),
offering several advantages over the older parallel ATA (PATA).
Interface: reduced cable-bulk and cost (7 conductors versus 40), native hot swapping, faster data
transfer through higher signalling rates, and more efficient transfer through an (optional) I/O
queuing protocol.

IDE Connector
Most motherboards have two IDE connectors, which allow two drives to be attached to each
connector.
One drive is set to master and the other drive is set to slave by using a jumper that is normally
located on the back of the drive.
This allows a total of four IDE devices, (or drives), to be attached to a typical computer.

PCI SLOTS
PCI is a Local Bus standard for attaching hardware devices in a computer.
It has displaced ISA and VESA Local Bus as the standard expansion bus
These devices can take either the form of an integrated circuit fitted onto the motherboard
itself, called a planar device in the PCI specification, or an expansion card that fits into a slot
Despite the availability of faster interfaces such as PCI-X and PCI Express, conventional
PCI remains a very common interface.
Typical PCI cards used in PCs include:
network cards, sound cards, modems,extra ports such as USB or serial, TV tuner cards
disk controllers, Historically video cards

PCI-X
PCI-X, short for PCI-eXtended, is a computer bus and expansion card standard that
enhances the 32-bit PCI Local Bus for higher bandwidth demanded by servers. It is a
double-wide version of PCI, running at up to four times the clock speed, but is otherwise
similar in electrical implementation and uses the same protocol.

PCI Express Slot

PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is
a computer expansion card standard designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X, and AGP bus
standards.

Advantage: higher maximum system bus throughput

PCI Express slots

Connectors

Connectors

Server Mother Board

Thanks