There is a growing demand for circuit boards in electronics systems to be inserted or extracted without switching off the power. Systems for telecom switching equipment, real-time transaction processing, air traffic controllers, and fault tolerant-computing must have minimum down time, and the capability to exchange hardware without affecting the system is important. This capability is known as live insertion, hot plugging, or hot swapping and can be implemented by careful design of hardware and software in a system. This paper describes the events that occur during live insertion and considerations when using Philips logic products.