Description
A motherboard (sometimes alternatively known as the mainboard, system board,planar board or logic
board, or colloquially, a mobo) is the main printed circuit board(PCB) found in computers and other expandable systems. It holds
many of the crucial electronic components of the system, such as the central processing unit (CPU) and memory,
and provides connectors for other peripherals.
Unlike a backplane,
a motherboard contains significant sub-systems such as the processor and other
components.
Motherboard specifically refers to a PCB with
expansion capability and as the name suggests, this board is the
"mother" of all components attached to it, which often include sound cards, video cards, network cards, hard drives,
or other forms of persistent storage;TV tuner cards,
cards providing extra USB or FireWire slots and a variety of other custom
components (the term mainboard is applied to devices with a single
board and no additional expansions or capability, such as controlling boards in
televisions, washing machines and other embedded systems).
History
Prior to the invention of the microprocessor,
a computer consisted of multiple printed circuit boards in a card-cage case
with components connected by a backplane,
a set of interconnected sockets. In very old designs the wires were discrete
connections between card connector pins, but printed circuit boards soon became
the standard practice. The Central Processing Unit, memory and peripherals were housed on individual printed circuit
boards which were plugged into the backplate.
During the late 1980s and 1990s, it became
economical to move an increasing number of peripheral functions onto the
motherboard. In the late 1980s, personal computer motherboards began to include
single ICs (also called Super I/O chips) capable of supporting a set of
low-speed peripherals: keyboard, mouse, floppy disk
drive, serial ports,
and parallel ports.
By the late-1990s, many personal computer motherboards supported a full range
of audio, video, storage, and networking functions without the need for any expansion cards at all; higher-end systems for 3D gaming
and computer
graphics typically
retained only the graphics card as a separate component.
The most popular computers such as the Apple II and IBM PC had published schematic diagrams and
other documentation which permitted rapid reverse-engineering and third-party replacement
motherboards. Usually intended for building new computers compatible with the
exemplars, many motherboards offered additional performance or other features
and were used to upgrade the manufacturer's original equipment.
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