IntroductionAs chip designers pack more functions into ICs,pin counts continue to grow and the space betweenpins keeps shrinking. Pin spacings of 0.5 mm and0.65 mm are not at all uncommon. The power ofthese new ICs is wonderful, to be sure, but trou-bleshooting them can be a chore because connect-ing scopes and logic analyzers has become muchmore difficult and less dependable.
The System Management BIOS Reference Specification addresses how motherboard and system vendors present
management information about their products in a standard format by extending the BIOS interface on Intel
architecture systems. The information is intended to allow generic instrumentation to deliver this data to
management applications that use CIM (the WBEM data model) or direct access and eliminates the need for error
prone operations like Probing system hardware for presence detection.
