PCI Specifications Documents

The following files are various PCI-related technical specifications documents which are freely available for download.

This website is not the official source for any of these documents; in fact this website is not associated with the PCI-SIG or other specification sources in any way. If you enquire at the official PCI information source (which is the PCI-SIG website) you will find that they want to charge you for the SUPPLY of their documents, and they charge rather outrageous prices for them. This seems silly when, on this page, they specifically state that the specs are open standards, available to anyone.

It seems that the standards themselves are free, but to obtain a copy of them, you must pay what therefore amounts to an incredibly high postage and handling fee (Currently $USD1500!). They are supposed to be a 'not-for-profit' organisation, so I don't understand how they can justify such a price. Because they hold the Copyright, they can do this quite legally thanks to Copyright law; morally, however, is another thing entirely (Since when does an open standard which is available to anyone, actually cost money???). For this reason I have had to discontinue offering certain standards for download from this site.

Clearly, the PCI-SIG have moved to protect their own agenda; they want everyone developing PCI related products to become a member (because once a member, they can exert their control over you); for this they charge you outrageous annual membership fees. For non-members, the cost of the specs is set deliberately way high, no doubt to deliberately discourage independent developers participation their their little "club". I wonder why a registered non-profit organisation needs to charge such high fees for open standards??? If you find this unacceptable, why not complain directly to the PCI-SIG?

Having said all that, updated versions of any of these files would be most welcome - please email me if you have a contribution to make for this section. I do not have the resources to purchase and post here new specifications as they are released, so what you see here is what I have managed to collect over the years. Please don't send me copyrighted material for publishing unless you have written permission or clear proof that listing here is not violating anyone's rights.

PLEASE DO NOT EMAIL ME ASKING FOR SPECS NOT LISTED HERE - IF IT'S NOT HERE, I DO NOT HAVE IT!! Instead, use common sense to locate what you want - entering a few key words into an Internet search engine like Google or Yahoo will usually find what you want on the first try. Please do not ask me to supply you with copyrighted material of the PCI-SIG, as that is illegal.

The files are (mostly) in Adobe Acrobat .PDF format - right-click on a link and select 'save target as...' to save the file on your system. Visit www.adobe.com for a copy of the free Acrobat viewer program. Some files are also zipped for extra space saving - unzip with Winzip or Windows XP. Visit www.winzip.com for a copy of Winzip.

Greyed out specifications have been removed due to copyright assertion by their owners, the PCI-SIG.