Limits of backplane bus design

The author examines the fundamental design parameters of backbone interconnection including: architecture, synchronization, bus width, protocols, arbitration, and the transmission medium. The theoretical limits to the bus performance are examined along with type of system and information-flow organization that can allow effective utilization of the available bandwidth. The two technology-dependent parameters which dominate the performance of the theoretically highest performance source synchronized protocols are the manufacturing skews, and capture windows of the communicating devices. This suggests that there is considerable scope in the technology to improve the bandwidth available in backplane buses