Digital Input/Output (I/O) Bus for Simulators

The emergence of high speed serial bus standards in the PC market has created a low cost interface with the bandwidth requirements to support large volume transfer of data to remote devices. IEEE-1394 (FireWire) and USB 2.0 have both been endorsed by manyPC manufacturers as standard equipment. Both busses support data bandwidths (maximum) of at least 400 M bits per second. Integrated Circuit manufacturers have developed low cost, smart controllers for remote devices for each bus. When coupled with anhighly adaptable interface device, such as the very low cost Programmable Logic Devices (PLD) on the market today, a modular and flexible solution appears. Combine this with software drivers, tools, and applications that make the system easy to use, andyou have a very cost effective solution to complex I/O systems, such as those of simulator devices. This proposal outlines the requirements of such a solution. The result of this effort will be a very low cost, highly adpatable, user friendly system thatcan be used by any simulator manufacturer to solve their I/O problems. The modular, flexible system proposed herein has many commercial applications for smart, low cost I/O devices. RPA has already developed a USB 2.0 version of the product forcommercial sale and has been selling PCI and PC-104+ versions since 1997.