Docking Stations

PCIe Docking Stations allow the extension of Desktop and Laptop PCs by PCIe slots in external chassis. Different solutions are available from different vendors world-wide. A Docking Station can be a single card chassis or a 19" rack with 16 full-size slots. Spectrum no longer sells Docking Stations due to the low demand and Spectrums own Ethernet-based digitizerNETBOX and generatorNETBOX solutions.

However in some applications a Docking Station may be helful. A need for more than 6 cards in a chassis can be either fulfilled by special 19" industrial computers based on a backplane/slot-CPU solution. Or it can be fulfilled by a combination of a standard PC and a Docking Stations. The latter separates instrument housing and workstation and is easier to maintain and update.

Interfacing

Standard interfacing is a PCIe interface card or even two for very powerful Docking Stations with a lot of throughput. These solutions normally work without any additonal software drivers and with minimum problems. However it always can be that the BIOS of the host PC can't handle the extended number of PCIe slots that are located in the Docking Station as it was never tested against these. Please understand that this is beyond our control and we can't help here.

For a Laptop there's normally only the choise to use a Thunderbolt interface Docking Station. Please chck with the Docking Station provider whether this works with your chossen Laptop.

As far as we know (2020), there is no PCIe Docking Station with USB interface on the market. That is due to the fact that USB drivers and PCIe drivers work totally different and there's no way to extend the PCIe bus via USB transparanetly.

Purchase of Docking Stations

Although Spectrum is not selling Docking Stations we have some knowledge based on different customer projects. Please ask for your specific setup to get recommendations for selected products that have been tested with Spectrum card: request