Futurebus+ as an I/O Bus: Profile B

The IEEE Futurebus+ is a very fast (3GB/sec.), industry standard backplane bus specification for computer systems. Futurebus+ was designed independent of any CPU architecture so it is truly open. With this open architecture Futurebus+ can be applied to many different computing applications. Profile B is a subset of the IEEE 896 Futurebus+ standard and targets high performance, general purpose computer I/O applications. This paper describes how and why the functional, electrical, mechanical and environmental characteristics were chosen.