Building blocks for super highways

A concept for a super highway, capable of switching and transporting digital video (uncompressed D1), digital voice and digital data is presented-the High Speed Bus. The super highway is intended for deployment inside 'campus and intelligent offices' such as video studios, broadcast stations, etc. . . where high transmission bandwidth and medium to short range is required. The super highway is based on a novel concept for high speed multiplexing/demultiplexing developed in a 4.5 Gbps version. The development was carried out for the European Space Agency on the COLUMBUS Space Station programme. A D1 compatible video subsystem, for the Space Station with a switching & routing unit, a sync distribution unit frame store, etc. . . was built on a prototype level. The transmission concept is byte oriented (one byte contains 14 bits in this case). This implies that the user of the super highway is dealing with the byte clock which is at a much lower frequency than the bit clock. Complexity and problems are removed from the user interface compared to other systems. The point to point link based on the novel high speed multiplexer and high speed demultiplexer is the 'building block' in the super highway. Several possible configurations for the super highway are presented and the performances described.<
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