Posted April 21, 2012 by Chris

“A while ago I picked up a Xilinx XC95108 CPLD in a PC84 package for about $10 from a surplus electronics shop. When I built a CPLD project board with a PC44 socket I realized that I never wanted to deal with a socket like that on a home-etched board again, so in the back of my mind I had been looking for an excuse to surface mount the big chip. When I got the urge one weekend to build a PCI card I realized that there would never be another project that offered such easy routing of surface mount pads to card edge fingers.”