“These critical systems need to deliver upwards of 99.999% availability, which makes prolonged maintenance and unplanned downtime unacceptable,” said the firm. Hot-swapping is widely employed to keep these systems running, however today’s sensitive high-speed serial communication busses were not designed to facilitate hot-swapping.”

The chip, the PI6ULS5V9511A provides a bidirectional buffer between the card’s SDA and SCL signals and the system’s live busses.