FASTBUS for Data Acquisition and Control

FASTBUS is a standardized modular data-bus system for data acquisition, data processing and control applications. It is the result of an interlaboratory development undertaken to meet the needs of the high energy physics community. However, the versatility, speed and addressing capability of FASTBUS make it attractive for many other types of application. A FASTBUS system consists of bus Segments which operate independently but dynamically link together as needed for operation passing. This parallel processing feature accounts to a great extent for the high throughput of FASTBUS in multisegment systems. Master modules compete for single or multiple Segment Control through a bus arbitration scheme using assigned priorities. Logical, geographical, secondary and broadcast addressing methods are used to access either data space or control and status register space. Features include block transfers, a sparse data scan and interrupts.