Computer Busses

A reference on computer bus architecture and interfacing, covering the ISA, PCI, AGP, USB, and industrial buses that underpinned PC hardware design and embedded systems of its era.

The text walks through the on-board interconnect standards of the late-1990s and early-2000s PC and embedded environment — ISA and EISA, PCI and AGP, the SCSI families, the IEEE-1394 FireWire bus, USB in its early generations, and the industrial fieldbus and instrumentation buses then competing with Ethernet for control-system traffic. Each chapter sets out the protocol layers, the electrical signalling, and the selection criteria that would steer a hardware designer toward one bus rather than another.

William Buchanan is Professor of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University and the author of a long sequence of computing textbooks across networks, security and systems architecture. The volume was issued in collaboration with Butterworth-Heinemann and stands now as a record of the period in which PC and embedded buses were proliferating before USB and Ethernet consolidated the field.