A new CAMAC and VXIbus high performance highway interconnect

High performance, distributed data acquisition and control systems based on the CAMAC Serial Highway have been used extensively in the nuclear science field for 20 years. The need for higher I/O system throughput and the increased use of VXIbus-based instrumentation has led to the development of a new highway interconnect. This interconnect supports CAMAC crates, VXI chassis or a mixture of CAMAC and VXI on a high-speed fiber-optic highway. A typical highway interconnect system consists of a VMEbus or PCI bus host interface card, a fiber-optic ring configuration, CAMAC crate controllers and/or VXI Slot-0 controllers. The development of a VME-based I/O controller is being considered. Various throughput benchmarks and initial field experience are discussed. The crate controller supports the FASTCAMAC protocol being proposed to the NIM Committee. The maximum I/O throughput in FASTCAMAC mode is 10 megabytes/s.