A bus on a diet-the serial bus alternative-an introduction to the P1394 High Performance Serial Bus

The author discusses the justifications for the use of a serial bus in computer systems. He then describes a leading proposal for such an interconnect: the IEEE P1394 High Performance Serial Bus. The highlights of the Serial Bus include: (1) a physical layer supporting both cable media and many ANSI/IEEE standard 32-bit buses; (2) variable speed data transmission with a base speed of almost 100 Mbit/sec between nodes separated by distances up to 10 meters; (3) both fair and priority arbitration mechanisms with all nodes guaranteed at least partial access to the bus regardless of priority; (4) bus transactions that include block and single quadlet reads and writes, as well as an isochronous mode which provides a low-overhead guaranteed bandwidth service; and (5) dynamic address assignment that does not require switches or a physical ´slot number´.<>