The proposed SSBLT standard doubles the VME64 transfer rate

A revision to the IEEE 1014 VMEbus standard that offers a source synchronous block transfer (SSBLT) protocol which doubles the transfer rate without changing the backplane or electrical interface is discussed. Operating over the 64-b VMEbus, data transfers at 20M transfers/s times 8 bytes per transfer, for a burst transfer rate of 160 Mbytes/s. This performance improvement results purely from protocol improvements. SSBLT allows transfers to make use of standard VMEbus backplanes and driver technology and permits systems employing SSBLT to be backward compatible with present IEEE 1014 VMEbus modules. The faster transfer rate is shown to double the performance/cost ratio of the bus.<
>