Windows event showcases FireWire applications

Representing the 1394 Trade Association, Oxford Semiconductor made a series of new FireWire technology demonstrations at this year's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference May 4-7 at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle. The demonstrations formed a part of the WinHEC Windows Community Pavilion.

The first demonstration featured 1394-based multi-channel audio and showed how DVD content is readily sent over IEEE1394b to an external array of eight digital audio output channels. Based on Oxford Semiconductor's OXFW970, a dedicated FireWire audio controller IC, the solution removes the need to install separate sound cards and does not require an external power supply for the speaker configuration.

The IEEE1394b standard, also known as FireWire 800, supports transmission speeds up to 800 Megabits/sec and distances up to 100 meters, making it ideal for long-range home entertainment network backbones.

The second demonstration featured Oxford Semiconductor's OXFW912 FireWire800 to IDE bridge chip in an IEEE1394b based RAID system and showed FireWire's ability to stripe at 80MBytes/sec speeds - almost three times as fast as USB 2.0, which completes the same striping tasks at only 30MBytes/sec.

A further demonstration featured isochronous (real-time) delivery of camcorder content to a peer-to-peer external hard disk drive featuring a portable viewer, and connected to a PC using the SBP-2 protocol. The video images travelling from camcorder to drive being converted to asynchronous content on-the fly.

"Our aim at WinHEC 2004 was to highlight the great speed, versatility and reliability offered by the FireWire standard. The audio demonstration in particular shows the excellent performance that 1394 can deliver." said Jalil Oraee, Chief Technical Officer at Oxford Semiconductor and Financial Officer for the 1394 Trade Association.