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Multibus is a computer bus standard used in industrial systems. It was developed by Intel Corporation and was adopted as the IEEE 796 bus. The Multibus specification was important because it was a robust, well-thought out industry standard with a relatively large form factor, so complex devices could be designed on it. Because it was a well-defined and well-documented industry standard, it allowed a Multibus-compatible industry to grow around it, with many companies making card cages and enclosures for it. Many others made CPU, memory, and other peripheral boards. In 1982 there were over 100 Multibus board and systems manufacturers.〔ftp://reports.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/csl/tr/82/229/CSL-TR-82-229.pdf The SUN Workstation Architecture, Andreas Bechtolsheim, Forest Baskett, Vaughan Pratt, Stanford University Computer systems Laboratory Technical Report No. 229, March 1982〕 This allowed complex systems to be built from commercial off-the-shelf hardware, and also allowed companies to innovate by designing a proprietary Multibus board and then integrating it with other vendors' hardware to create a system. A good example of this was Sun Microsystems with their Sun 1 and Sun 2 workstations. Sun built custom-designed CPU, memory, SCSI, and video display boards, and then added 3Com Ethernet networking boards, Xylogics SMD disk controllers, Ciprico Tapemaster 1/2 inch tape controllers, Sky Floating Point Processor, and Systech 16-port Terminal Interfaces in order to configure the system as a workstation or a file server.〔(The Sun Hardware Reference )〕 Other workstation vendors who used Multibus-based designs included HP/Apollo〔http://www.umich.edu/~archive/apollo/partnos.txt HP/APOLLO SYSTEMS INFORMATION〕 and Silicon Graphics IRIS.〔http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/iris-faq.html Silicon Graphics IRIS 2000/3000 FAQ〕 The Intel Multibus I & II product line was purchased from Intel by RadiSys Corporation, which in 2002 was then purchased by (U.S. Technologies, Inc. ) U.S. Technologies is the worldwide, exclusive, authorized and licensed source of Intel/RadiSys Multibus I and II boards, modules, cages, accessories, test sets and backplanes. == Multibus architecture == Multibus is an asynchronous bus that accommodates devices with various transfer rates while maintaining maximum throughput. It had 20 address lines so it could address up to 1 Mb of Multibus memory and 1 Mb of I/O locations. Most Multibus I/O devices only decoded the first 64 Kb of address space. Multibus supported multi-master functionality that allowed it to share the Multibus with multiple processors and other DMA devices.〔Sun 68000 Board User's Manual, Sun Microsystems, Inc, February 1933, Revision B〕 The standard Multibus form factor was a , circuit board with two ejection levers on the front edge. The board had two buses. The wider P1 bus which pin assignment was defined by the Multibus specification. A second smaller P2 bus was also defined as a private bus. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Multibus」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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