Is a Serial Bus with Multimaster Capability a Solution for a CAMAC Simple System?

With recently announced microprocessors (Philips 8400) a serial link with multimaster capability due to a serial priority arbitration scheme is available. This allows easy implementation of a serial bus within a single CAMAC crate for communication between modules at a data rate up to 150.000 bit/sec. Thus the CAMAC bus interface of a module and the crate controller are significantly reduced. Advantages of the serial link will be discussed. This scheme will be used for control and data acquisition of a X-ray single crystal diffractometer consisting of a scaler module, stepper controller module, I/O module and a display module with a functional keyboard together with a LSI-11 computer module.