Address phase:

A PCI bus transaction starts having an address phase. The initiator,  after seeing that it has GNT# and the bus is inactive, drives the target address onto the AD[31:0] lines, the associated command (for example: I/O write or memory read,) on the C/BE[3:0]# lines, and pulls FRAME# low.

Each other device inspect the address and command & decides whether to respond as the target by asserting DEVSEL#. Device has to respond by asserting DEVSEL# within 3 cycles. Devices which promise to respond within one or two cycles are said to have "fast DEVSEL" or "medium DEVSEL", respectively. (In fact, the time to respond is 2.5 cycles, since PCI devices have to transmit all signals half a cycle early so that they can be retaining3 cycles later.)Note that a device have to latch the address on the first cycle; the initiator is needed to remove the address and command from the bus on the following cycle, even before retaining a DEVSEL# response. The extra time is available only for interpreting the address and command after it is captured. On the fifth cycle of the address phase (or earlier if all other devices have medium DEVSEL or faster), a catch-all "subtractive decoding" is permitted for some address ranges. It is generally used by an ISA bus bridge for addresses within its particular range (16 bits for I/O and 24 bits for memory).

On the sixth cycle, if there has been no response, the initiator can abort the transaction by deserting FRAME#. It is known as master abort termination and it is customary for PCI bus bridges to return all- ones data (0xFFFFFFFF) in this particular case. PCI devices therefore are generally designed to ignore by using the all-ones value in essential status registers, so that such type of error may be easily detected by software.