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

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.