Slightly more than half of this book is devoted to detailed overviews of the following widely used backplane bus systems: VMEbus, Multibus I, NuBus, UNIBUS (including the Q_Bus and the VAXBI bus), IBM Micro Channel, FASTBUS, Futurebus, STD Bus, and Multibus II. Each chapter is written by someone closely associated with the particular bus and discusses its history and rationale, functional structure, electrical data, mechanical structure, and application examples.

Additional chapters discuss key topics in the design of a backplane bus system. These include printed circuit design (stressing circuit materials and board fabrication), transmission line reflections, pulse crosstalk, connector design, transceiver technology and design, caching, and the limits of backplane bus performance. A chapter on guidelines and trends provides some discussion of bus selection criteria and future developments. The book also contains an overview of the standards development process, which emphasizes practices and procedures in the IEEE Computer Society. This volume should be a valuable reference both for the system designer who is choosing among existing bus systems and for the person who is designing a new bus system.