## Input/Output Device Driver Reference

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### PCMCIA Hardware

There are three major hardware components defined in the PCMCIA standard:

Cards
Sockets
Adapters

The cards come in several standardized sizes and shapes that are called form factors. The basic form factor is very similar to a credit card. There is a wide range of potential applications for PCMCIA cards, including:

Connectivity devices, such as modems, local area networks (LANs), and terminal emulators

Secondary storage devices, such as mini rotating hard disks, solid state file disks, and flash

Random access memory, such as SRAM, DRAM, or NVRAM memory

Storage for software, such as applications, device drivers, and ROM extensions

PCMCIA cards are treated in much the same way as standard removable media such as diskettes. The card slots, or sockets, are open bays into which the PCMCIA cards can be inserted without removing the system covers or turning off the system unit. Some PCMCIA Sockets contain mechanisms similar to those on diskette drives such as levers and locks.

Adapters are connected to the host system's bus. The adapters map the host system bus technology to the PCMCIA technology. According to PCMCIA standards, up to 256 adapters can exist on a host system, and each adapter can have a maximum of 16 sockets.