H-bus: a media acquisition bus optimized for multiple streams

The H-Bus is a dedicated input bus designed for transmitting digital media streams from multiple sources to one acquiring host device. Unlike previous solutions to this problem which utilized a star topology to connect each source to a bank of analog-to-digital converters in the host device, the H-Bus places the A/D converters at each of the sources and uses a linear topology to connect the devices together in one contiguous chain. In this paper we explain the engineering requirements which motivated our design, describe the electrical and physical characteristics of, and applications for, the H-Bus.