A FASTBUS Buffered Interconnect: What Are the Options?

FASTBUS was designed as a system comprised of multiple bus segments in order to increase system throughput by parallel processing. Segments can operate independently but may also be connected together when necessary to accomplish intersegment communications. Two methods of interconnecting these segments were envisioned from the beginning. The first to be implemented, the ''Segment Interconnect,'' (SI) required great care in the FASTBUS protocol design to make its operation possible. The SI interface is a generalized bus window, temporarily synchronizing two segments and electrically connecting them so that handshakes between actual master and slave propagate through the interconnect. The second method is called the ''Buffered Interconnect,'' because the data to be transferred is stored temporarily in the interface and there is no direct handshake between the originating master and eventual receiving slave.