FASTBUS standard fiber optic data transfer link

The authors describe a unidirectional/bidirectional fiber-optic data transfer link being specified by the FASTBUS Standards Committee that can be incorporated into FASTBUS as well as other data acquisition systems. The FASTBUS or bidirectional mode allows relatively slow, long-distance communication of the full FASTBUS protocol. The high-speed transfer or unidirectional mode is optimized for pipelined data transfers with minimum handshaking overhead. This link is bus-independent and can be used to transfer data at high speeds between sets of devices each packaged in any bus standard or black-box implementation. Serial protocol flexibility permits the link to be used also as a central link. Simple messages are transmitted over this link to common data flow from front-end equipment to buffer memories or processor farms. The proposed FASTBUS serial line protocol and recommended optical hardware are detailed. An application example using the fiver-optic data link in a FASTBUS data acquisition system is shown