Out in Front: November 23, 1995

A new chip set from Texas Instruments links the IEEE-1394 high-speed serial bus to a PCI system bus. The two-chip set comprises a 1394-to-PCI link-layer controller and a 200-Mbps physical-layer interface device. The chip set comes with a software developers kit from Skipstone Inc (Austin, TX).

The chip set allows designers to implement the 1394 I/O bus for connection to consumer electronics, such as digital cameras, camcorders, and VCRs. It allows full-motion desktop videoconferencing, movie-quality multimedia authoring, video mail, and video editing.

The link-layer controller transmits and receives 1394 packets. The device features a 1-kbyte FIFO memory to facilitate isochronous and asynchronous data transfers. The device has four DMA channels, which support scatter/gather data storage in memory. A zoom-video port allows the transfer of data directly to a graphics card for display on a PC monitor without CPU intervention.

The three-port physical-layer interface chip performs bus-arbitration and -initialization functions. The device provides 2.5 times the throughput of parallel I/O buses, such as SCSI and IDE.

The Skipstone developer's tool kit provides the hardware and software tools for developing 1394 applications. The SerialSoft application-programming interface lets developers write their appli- cations to a high-level interface and avoid the complexities of IEEE-1394 implementations.

Samples of the link-layer chip will be available during the first quarter of 1996, and TI is scheduling volume productions for the second quarter. The physical-layer device will be available for sampling and will enter volume production in the first quarter of 1996. Prices are less than $20 (100,000) for the link-layer chip and $12 (100,000) for the physical-layer chip.
-- by John Gallant

Texas Instruments Inc, Denver, CO. (800) 477-8924.