Prof. N. K. Khosla of Department of Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science and his students, colleagues in Electrical Engineering have developed and patented a cost effective wired communication system involving Scalable Intelligent Multiple Bit Addressable bus (SIMBA). SIMBA is a type of bus system which can be used for interdevice serial communication in industrial monitoring, control and automation and other signaling applications.

Currently used field buses are available only in the high speed application domain, need repeaters for long distance communication and generally require expensive and complex devices to implement them. The cost-effectiveness of this invention makes the device ideally suited for a small to mid-sized manufacturing businesses that are looking to automate and control their process. The flexibility in the networking topology of SIMBA is a lucrative option to update systems with low budget applications.

The researchers tested the SIMBA in a pipeline corrosion monitoring process. A unique feature of the SlMBA device was that it derived its power for communication from itself by "bus shorting" the 2-wire communication channel. The self-powering capability of the device also makes this invention eco-friendly.

Though the use of wireless devices is becoming increasingly popular and convenient, majority of the households, educational institutes and office systems rely on their broadband and intra-network connectivity on serial communication devices. SIMBA can provide a communication system that can be effectively interfaced with Wide Area Networks. Because of its simplicity, the SIMBA architecture allows addition of new devices to the system with the intelligence to self-discover their bus specific parameters, such as a dynamically allocated address.