Types of buses:

1. Expansion buses
External bus or Expansion bus allows the CPU to talk to the other
devices in the computer and vice versa. It is called that because it's
external to the CPU. Expansion bus connect the CPU to peripheral
devices.
2. System buses :
What Is a System Bus?

• A bus is a set of electrical wires (lines) that connects the various hardware
components of a computer system.
• It works as a communication pathway through which information flows from one
hardware component to the other hardware component.

A bus that connects major components (CPU, memory and I/O devices) of a computer system
is called as a System Bus.

Why Do We Need a Bus?

• A computer system is made of different components such as memory, ALU,

registers etc.
• Each component should be able to communicate with others for proper execution of
instructions and information flow.
• If we try to implement a mesh topology among different components, it would be
really expensive.
• So, we use a common component to connect each necessary component i.e., BUS.

Components Of a System Bus-

The system bus consists of three major components-

 Data Bus Width

• The width of a data bus refers to the number of bits (electrical wires) that the bus can
carry at a time.
• Each line carries 1 bit at a time. So, the number of lines in data bus determines how
many bits can be transferred parallelly.
• The width of the data bus is an important parameter because it determines how much
data can be transmitted at one time.
• The wider the bus width, faster would be the data flow on the data bus and thus better
would be the system performance.

Examples-
• A 32-bit bus has thirty-two (32) wires and thus can transmit 32 bits of data at a time.
• A 64-bit bus has sixty-four (64) wires and thus can transmit 64 bits of data at a time.
2) Control Bus-

• As the name suggests, the control bus is used to transfer the control and timing
signals from one component to the other component.
• The CPU uses a control bus to communicate with the devices that are connected to
the computer system.
• The CPU transmits different types of control signals to the system components.
• It is bi-directional.

What Is Control & Timing Signals?

Control signals are generated in the control unit of CPU.

Timing signals are used to synchronize the memory and I/O operations with a CPU clock.

Typical control signals hold by control bus-

• Memory read – Data from memory address location to be placed on data bus.
• Memory writes – Data from data bus to be placed on memory address location.
• I/O Read – Data from I/O address location to be placed on data bus.
• I/O Write – Data from data bus to be placed on I/O address location.

Other control signals held by control bus are interrupt, interrupt acknowledge, bus request,
bus grant and several others.
The type of action taking place on the system bus is indicated by these control signals.

Example-

When CPU wants to read or write data, it sends the memory read or memory write control
signal on the control bus to perform the memory read or write operation from the main
memory. Similarly, when the processor wants to read from an I/O device, it generates the
I/O read signal.

3) Address Bus-
 • As the name suggests, an address bus is used to carry the address from CPU to
memory/IO devices.
• It is used to identify a particular location in memory.
• It carries the source or destination address of data i.e., where to store or from where
to retrieve the data.
• It is uni-directional.

Example-

When CPU wants to read or write data, it sends the memory read or memory write control
signal on the control bus to perform the memory read or write operation from the main
memory and the address of the memory location is sent on the address bus.
If CPU wants to read data stored at the memory location (address) 4, the CPU sends the
value 4 in binary on the address bus.

Address Bus Width

• The width of address bus determines the amount of physical memory addressable by
the processor.
• In other words, it determines the size of the memory that the computer can use.
• The wider the address bus, the more memory a computer will be able to use.
• The addressing capacity of the system can be increased by adding more address lines.

Examples-
• An address bus that consists of 16 wires can convey 216 (= 64K) different addresses.
• An address bus that consists of 32 wires can convey 232 (= 4G) different addresses.