Evolving buses: backplane buses mature to keep pace with technology

Considers how the role and importance of the backplane bus in a system has evolved along with the advances in technology over the past decade. Backplane buses have come a long way from the early days of fairly simple protocols, a couple of connectors, and some traces on a printed circuit board. In early bus-based systems, the backplane bus was the main system bus providing interconnects from the CPU to memory, I/O, peripherals, and networking. The bus interface alone could easily take up a third of the board real estate on a small card. In today´s systems, however, advances in technology and packaging art having a significant effect on what is expected of a backplane bus. Yesterday´s backplane buses can no longer keep up with the demands of today´s high-performance CPUs and their interconnection requirements. What we need is a new generation of buses to meet the expanded needs.<>