IEEE-488 is a standard set by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, know as a General-Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB), or Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus (HP-IB) - - a parallel bus common on test equipment.

Originally proposed by Hewlett-Packard in the late 1970s, the IEEE-488 bus interface greatly simplifies the interconnection of programmable instruments by clearly defining mechanical, hardware, and electrical protocol specifications. This technique allows up to 15 intelligent devices that have IEEE-488 bus interface to share a single bus.

The instruments on the bus are connected in parallel via a 16-signal line cable. Usually they are divided into three clusters according to their functions (Data Bus, Data Byte Transfer Control Bus, General Interface Management Bus).

The architecture of this interface is such that the slowest device on the bus participates in the control and data transfer handshakes to drive the speed of the transaction. The final result is a maximum data rate of about one megabit per second.

Since its inception, the IEEE standard has gone through an evolutionary path. In June 1987, a new standard (IEEE Std. 488.2-1987) for programmable instruments was approved. This new standard works with the IEEE Standard Digital Interface for Programmable Instrumentation, IEEE 488-1978 (also knows as IEEE-488.1).

MCC offers wide range of GPIB interface hardware and software products to meet most instrument interface requirements.

Measurement Computing Corporation offers the largest selection of PC-based data acquisition and measurement products. Shop our online catalog by selecting a category above. From PCI, USB, PC/104, ISA, and PCMCIA bus boards to external systems based on RS-232, RS-422, RS-485, and GPIB interfaces; Measurement Computing has everything you need for your PC-based data acquisition and control applications.