Expansion cards can often be installed or removed in the field, allowing a degree of user customization for particular purposes.
For example, a high-speed multi-channel data acquisition system would be of no use to a personal computer used for bookkeeping, but might be a key part of a system used for industrial process control. In computing, an expansion card (also called expansion board, adapter card or accessory card) is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an electrical connector, or expansion slot (also referred to as a bus slot) on a computer's motherboard, backplane or riser card to add functionality to a computer system.Įxpansion cards allow the capacities and interfaces of a computer system to be adjusted to the tasks it will perform. Thunderbolt 3 connector introduced by Intel in December 2015 multiplexes up to 4-lanes of PCIe 3.0 and 8-lanes of DisplayPort 1.2 and can support an external docking station housing one or more expansion cards with enough bandwidth to drive a mid-range GPU