Best of Show winner capitalises on bridge chip capability

Oxford's OXUF922 programmable bridge chip is at the heart of a Best of Show winner at this month's Macworld Conference and Exhibition held in San Francisco.

LaCie Bigger Disk, a 1 terabyte external hard drive, uses the '922 to create a unique triple interface comprising separate FireWire800, FireWire and USB2.0 connections. Regarded as the largest available 5.25 inch hard drive, the LaCie bigger disk achieves a top data throughput speed of 55MBytes/sec.

Introduced by Oxford Semiconductor in 2002, the OXUF922 integrates an 800Mbps 1394B Link layer and Phy interface, 480Mbps USB2.0 Phy and 133Mhz IDE controller in a 160 LQFP package.

The demand for massive, ultra fast storage devices has increased dramatically with the rapid emergence of MP3 audio and digital camcorders. As an illustration of the new drive's archiving potential, LaCie states it will store a month's worth of non-stop MPEG-2 video.