General Purpose Rack, Backplane, and Board Set for In-Situ Oceanographic Instrumentation

The need for a configurable, high-performance family of computer "building blocks" led to the design of a general purpose backplane architecture for the construction of processor systems to be used in oceanographic instrumentation. The architecture, called the "Instrument Bus", includes a CMOS backplane based on the IEEE 796 (Multibus I) standard, along with a card rack structure and mechanical specification to fit the standard 6" I.D. pressure case. A card set based on the 80C86 CPU was designed and implemented using this architecture. The set includes the CPU, 64k memory module, serial and parallel I/O, clock/timebase, counter/timer, and 16-bit A/D converter. The flexibility of the backplane specification accomodates a wide variety of CPU and I/O devices, and a wide range of resulting computer processing power. Designs scheduled for the near future include high speed (1 Mbit/sec) serial I/O, 68HCll CPU, and a TMS 320-based numeric processing slave. Applications to a number of instrument design situations are discussed.