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I want to get hold of the PCI Express specification which is available here . But when I try to download it, it asks me to login as a member - which requires membership at $3000 per year.

Is it possible to get hold of the specification without being a member, or having to pay this very high fee?

Larry Harson
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    Yes. A good search engine is your friend for this. Lots and lots of people publish things they shouldn't either intentionally or more often accidentally. Practice you google-fu. Start with "PCI Express specification filetype:pdf" and tune from there. – akohlsmith Jun 06 '13 at 00:49

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Technically, no. Of course people will pirate lots of things they shouldn't.

You get more than just access to the spec for that $3K. You get a PCIe Vendor ID number, which is required if you want to make a product that uses PCIe.

But... Do you really need the official spec? Probably 90% of the spec is only useful for people who are designing chips (not even FPGA's). Do you really care about the low-level signal encoding, or the more esoteric state machines? If not then there are books on PCIe that will likely be more useful to you than the spec will be. PCI Express System Architecture is one such book that can almost replace the spec, but there are many others.