Nominally called the IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) bus; how ever it's more correctly known as the ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) specification [ATA Bus]. The IDE bus is used in Personal Computers [PCs] as a hard-drive or peripheral bus to interconnect the PC mother board and a hard drive. The IDE bus is a Parallel bus. With the introduction of the Serial ATA [SATA] specification Parallel ATA [IDE] is now being called PATA.