Sun Microsystems Inc’s SBus technology bus has been adopted as an industry standard by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, IEEE. Wayne Fisher, chairman of the IEEE P1496 working group that approved the technology, declared, The adoption of SBus by IEEE is an acknowledgement of widespread industry acceptance and use. The specification, which defines all the electrical, mechanical and logical interfaces needed to build SBus products, is to be published shortly. SBus was first released in 1989 and is the highest performance local bus available for the RISC-based Unix market – it is also incorporated in all Sun Sparcstations and Sparcservers. SBus is essentially an inexpensive, microprocessor-independent bus that can be installed indirectly onto the primary system board. Reasons for the product’s success, according to Sun’s director of peripheral product marketing, Ed Turner, are: From the start, SBus has been free of any licensing restrictions, design fees or loyalties. Adherence to the published standard by all SBus manufacturers assures end-users not only of system compatibility and interoperability, but of protection of their investment as well. Overall, this benefits the entire Sparc systems community. More than 135 different manufacturers now sell over 350 different SBus input-output boards for applications as diverse as multimedia and speech recognition to networking interfaces and storage controllers.
