General Purpose Interface Bus connector

The GPIB (General Purpose Interface Bus), or IEEE 488, is a bus designed to connect computers, peripherals and laboratory instruments so that data and control information can pass between them. It is defined in IEEE Standard 488.1 (1987) Standard Digital Interface for Programmable Instrumentation, with a particular view to ATE (Automatic Test Equipment).

The standard GPIB is a 16 line, bit parallel, byte serial bus. It has 8 lines to transfer the 8-bit data byte, and 3 lines to perform the handshake to guarantee a reliable data transfer. Another 5 lines are used for interface management. Fig. 1 shows the connector pin outline, and a summary of the GPIB lines is given in Table 1.

GPIB connector
Fig.1 - The GPIB connector
Category Line Name
Data Lines DIO1 to DIO8 Data Input Output
Handshake
Lines
DAV Data Valid
NRFD Not Ready For Data
NDAC Not Data Accepted
Interface
Management
Lines
ATN Attention
IFC Interface Clear
REN Remote Enable
SRQ Service Request
EOI End or Identify

Table 1 - The GPIB lines