Computer Busses

22

IEEE-488, VME and VXI

22.1 Introduction

The IEEE-488, VME and VXI busses have all been used to interface to programmable instrumentation and controllers. They were at one time very popular, but with the increasing development of PCI, SCSI and RS-232 they have been replaced in many applications. IEEE-488 has the advantage of being very robust and simple to use, but suffers from a lack of speed. The VME bus has the opposite problem. It has fast data transfers and is powerful, but it is also difficult to use.

22.2 IEEE-488 bus

The IEEE-488 bus was developed in the 1970s as an answer to problems in interfacing with programmable instruments and controllers. Its history is as follows:

• 1975 – the IEEE published the IEEE-488 standard, which was based ...