What's new with FASTBUS and what's it done in the particle accelerator laboratories

Implementations of FASTBUS have been made in accelerator laboratories worldwide, resulting in clarifications, modifications and extensions of the specifications. Of tremendous benefit to users have been FASTBUS Standard Routines. The availability of such standard software is unique for high-speed bus systems and resulted from the involvement of hardware and software specialists in all aspects of the development. FASTBUS is the highest-performance instrumentation and data acquisition bus in existence and its development was essential to handle the outputs of detectors used with high-energy accelerators now in operation. It has been an important factor in experiments, including the Z/sup 0/ measurements at CERN, Fermilab, and SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). Also among numerous FASTBUS implementations are those for TPC (TOPAZ Time Projection) systems at KEK (Japan National Laboratory for High Energy Physics) and BNL (Brookhaven National Laboratory). >