sunflash-Distributed to mailing list sun/NC/north-carolina sunflash-Send requests, problems to owner-sunflash@suntri.east.sun.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Florida SunFlash SBus Officially Accepted As An Open IEEE Standard SunFLASH Vol 55 #32 July 1993 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 55.32 SBus Officially Accepted As An Open IEEE Standard SMCC announced that SBus input/output (I/O) bus has been accepted as an industry standard by the IEEE. IEEE standard 1496-1993 is called "Standard for a Chip and Module Interconnect: SBus," ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- SBUS OFFICIALLY ACCEPTED AS AN OPEN IEEE STANDARD MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -July 27, 1993 - Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation (SMCC) today announced that SBus input/output (I/O) bus has been accepted as an industry standard by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), an accredited Standards Development Organization. The IEEE standard 1496-1993 titled, "Standard for a Chip and Module Interconnect: SBus," was approved on June 17 and will be published shortly. The specification defines all of the electrical, logical, and mechanical interfaces necessary to build SBus products. First designed and introduced by SMCC in 1989, SBus is the highest performance local bus available for the RISC computer/UNIX operating system market and is included in all SPARCstation TM and SPARCserverTM computers. There is a rapidly increasing SBus installed base, as well as a growing number of SBus card vendors. Over 135 different manufacturers supply more than 350 different SBus I/O cards, with more than 1,500,000 SBus slots now available worldwide from a variety of computer manufacturers. It is an inexpensive, microprocessor-independent bus that can be installed directly onto the primary system board. SBus cards are easy to install and configure by end-users, and offer systems and board vendors high performance at low cost. According to Ed Turner, SMCC director of peripherals product marketing, "From the start, SBus has been free of any licensing restrictions, design fees or royalties. Adherence to the published standard by all SBus manufacturers assures end-users not only of system compatibility and interoperability, but of protection of their investment as well. Overall, this benefits the entire SPARC, systems community. The acceptance of SBus by the IEEE for adoption is further proof of SMCC's commitment to open systems and standards." Wayne Fischer of Force Computers and chairperson of the IEEE P1496 Working Group, added "The adoption of SBus by IEEE is an acknowledgment of widespread industry acceptance and use." Sun Microsystems has been the leading advocate of open systems product and standards since its inception in 1982. Products based on open interfaces allow multiple companies to independently develop compatible -- and sometimes competing -- products, thus offering innovation and cost savings to users. Examples of other Sun contributions to the open interface market include ONC/NFS, a platform protocol and distributed computing file system technology, SVR4, and the SPARC, architecture. Simple Specifications Lead to Sophisticated Applications Today's user wants power and expandability on the desktop at an affordable price. In many computer systems, lack of sufficient I/O bandwidth causes bottlenecks. SBus breaks the bottlenecks by being the only standard desktop expansion bus to keep up with today's faster systems and I/O devices. The simplicity of the SBus specification also reduces development time, thereby cutting costs and speeding time to market. SBus cards are now on the market for a wide range of sophisticated applications, from multimedia and speech recognition, to networking interfaces and storage controllers. SBus Key Features The following are a few of the key features that have contributed to the success and growing popularity of SBus: 160 MBytes/sec bandwidth; 32 bit virtual addressing; 32 bit and 64 bit data paths; and direct virtual memory access (DVMA). SBus boards are about the size of a postcard, can handle up to 128 byte burst transfers, and have master, slave and interrupt capability. Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation (SMCC), is the world's leading supplier of client-server computing solutions. It is an operating company of Sun Microsystems, Inc., the exclusive computer supplier to World Cup USA 1994. SMCC has its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. # # # Sun, Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, the Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation logo, ONC, NFS, and ONC/NFS are registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. All SPARC trademarks, including the SCD compliant logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. SPARCstation and SPARCserver are licensed exclusively to Sun Microsystems, Inc. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based on an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark of Unix Systems Laboratories. All other products are referred to herein by the trademarks as designated by the companies who market those products. ********************************************************************** For information about SunFlash send mail to info-sunflash@Sun.COM. Subscription requests should be sent to sunflash-request@Sun.COM. Archives are on draco.nova.edu, ftp.uu.net, sunsite.unc.edu, src.doc.ic.ac.uk and ftp.adelaide.edu.au All prices, availability, and other statements relating to Sun or third party products are valid in the U.S. only. Please contact your local Sales Representative for details of pricing and product availability in your region. Descriptions of, or references to products or publications within SunFlash does not imply an endorsement of that product or publication by Sun Microsystems. Send brief articles (e.g. third party announcements) and include contact information (non-800#, fax #, email, etc) to: John McLaughlin, SunFlash editor, flash@Sun.COM. +1 305 351 4909