What is a backplane?

A backplane is a circuit board that connects physical interfaces (connectors) in parallel with one another, forming a computing bus for a slot CPU card within an industrial PC system. A backplane is available with PCI connectors, ISA connector or both, for PICMG. A backplane is also available with 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 14, and 20 slots. The different slot types allow a flexible range of printed circuit boards (PCB) to be connected to the backplane, including various add-on cards, slot CPU cards and even single board computers, ultimately making up a complete computer system. This flexibility enables backplanes to be best suited for industrial PCs.

Also, due to their superior reliability, backplanes are the preferred medium over cabling systems. The cables in a cabling system need to be flexed every time a card is added, and “flexing” causes mechanical failures. Backplanes do not encounter this problem so the lifetime of a backplane is limited only by its connectors.

Backplanes are offered in passive and active forms. Passive backplanes offer no active bus driving circuitry whereas active backplanes include chips which buffer various signals to the slots. Generally, backplanes are differentiated from motherboards because of the lack of on-board processing power where the CPU is on a plug-in card.

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Acrosser Backplane products