With serial bus-like FireWire, your PC may catch fire

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): By now you must already be somewhat familiar with the Universal Serial Bus (USB). Not very long from now, you will be seeing another type of connector port at the back of your PC, notebook and handheld devices. In fact, the two Silicon Graphics Visual Workstations that I covered in my article last week already have it, and it is called FireWire. As you can see in the accompanying picture of the rear panel, each workstation has two of these connectors, and that's why you can have two live videos simultaneous streaming into the system.

As the Visual Workstations show, FireWire will not replace USB, it will complement the already accepted successor of the old and faithful parallel and serial ports. FireWire is also known as IEEE 1394. No, not because the specification was ratified more than 600 years ago, but because the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers gave the number 1394 to the specification that they accepted back in 1995.

Serial

FireWire was actually the brainchild of Apple Computer back in 1990. Back then, when you talked about audio and video, you must be talking about the Macs because only the Macs could handle multimedia acceptably well. That's also the reason the FireWire standard has a very strong background of digital consumer electronics (CE), particularly the ones that store, process and play back audio and video contents.

Like the USB, FireWire is actually a serial bus. It means that data is sent through one after the other, like people in a supermarket checkout counter. However, unlike the original serial connection (RS232C) that you have on your PC, which is capable of transmitting data at the rate of 115 Kilobit per second at the maximum, a FireWire is capable of pumping 100, 200, 400 and 800 Megabit of data per second (Mbps), depending on the configuration. At the moment, talks have been ongoing for a FireWire of 1.6 Gigabit per second (Gbps) data rate. In comparison, the USB connection is capable of only 1.2 Mbps.

The USB is fine for medium and low data transfer requirements. You can connect a scanner, a mouse, a keyboard, a display monitor, even a pair of digital speakers to your PC through the USB connection. However, you cannot really use an external data storage device like Jaz from Iomega. You still need a SCSI interface for a fast storage subsystem.

FireWire exceeds the data transfer capability of the SCSI. Not only that, you can connect up to 63 devices. It is actually half the total number of devices that you can connect to a USB, but who cares? Can you think of 30 devices that you want to connect to your PC at the same time? Unlike in a USB connection, where you may need a hub if you want to connect more than one device, the FireWire connection is completely peer-to-peer.

FireWire also expands the concept of plug `n play further as compared with the USB. You can add a device -- say, a FireWire printer -- and the system will automatically recognize it. Pull the printer out, and the system will reconfigure itself. You can even do this without having to power down the PC first. Incidentally, Hewlett-Packard already has a FireWire printer just in case you want to run ahead of the pack.

With such a strong background in the consumer electronics industry, it is no surprise that FireWire is going to be used for connecting the PC to devices such as a digital video camera, a digital still camera, a digital Hi-Fi, a digital monitor, a Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) and other digital consumer electronics products.

Who has it?

Intel has been promoting new types of computers that they call "Legacy-free PCs". In their recommendations, the new PCs should no longer use old subsystems such as the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) expansion slots, the parallel and the serial ports. To replace these two ports, Intel suggests putting both the USB and the FireWire ports on the box. With these two new connectors, you won't even have to open up the box to add new components.

We know that the two Silicon Graphics workstations have FireWire. Apple Computer puts FireWire on every Power Macintosh G3. Last year, Compaq already put FireWire in its Presario 5600 Series. A brand new product from Sony called PictureBook is also equipped with a FireWire port.

What about hard disks? Since the data transfer rate is better than SCSI, it is just natural that people will go with FireWire hard disks. So far, none of the big players in the hard disk industry, such as Seagate, Quantum and IBM, has announced a FireWire hard disk, but we know they are working on it. At the recent MacWorld, however, a company called VST Technologies already showed around their FireWire hard disks and magneto- optical drives. We can expect FireWire hard disks to eventually kill SCSI hard disks.

There is a problem with copyright protection, though. As the digital contents (movies, music, etc.) travel along the FireWire connection, say from a video-on-demand service to your digital TV, you can easily record them directly on your PC's hard disk. To overcome this problem, five companies (Intel, Sony, Hitachi, Toshiba and Matsushita) have devised an encryption and decryption method for digital contents protection. They call the method 5C -- for "5 companies". How creative! Sony has come up with two chips that it calls i.LINK LSI that do the encryption and decryption on the fly, and this is hoped to expedite the adoption of FireWire by the industry.

This new standard is really gaining momentum, because people do want to connect their PC to other consumer electronics. For example, people want to be able to capture live video with their digital video camera, and with FireWire they won't need specialized boards such as miroVideo DC30. Thus, you can already expect the next generation of Home PCs to have FireWire in addition to USB ports.