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FireWire Questions & Answers
What Does IEEE 1394 Mean?
IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers) refers to the engineering corps that devel-
oped the 1394th standard, defining the high-perfor-
mance serial input/output (I/O) bus used to connect
peripheral devices. There are now two standards:
IEEE 1394a, which refers to the original standard
adopted in 1995, and IEEE 1394b, which refers to the
new standard, adopted in 2002.
What Is The Relationship Between IEEE
1394, FireWire, iLink And DV?
These four names all refer to the same interface:
IEEE 1394 is the term commonly used in the com-
puter industry.
FireWire is the brand name used by Apple.
iLink is the brand name used by Sony for both con-
sumer electronics and personal computers.
DV is short for “Digital Video,” and is used as the
logo for the interface on most video camcorders.
What Are The FireWire Interface Benefits?
The FireWire interface is a fast, cross-platform se-
rial bus, and is ideal for digital audio, video and graphic
applications that demand plenty of bandwidth. Both
versions of FireWire offer Plug & Play connectivity, so
all you have to do is plug in your drive and you’re ready
to go. They also allow up to 63 devices to be connect-
ed via a single bus and offer peer-to-peer connectivity,
enabling multiple computers and FireWire devices to
be connected at the same time. FireWire also supports
both isochronous and asynchronous capabilities, mean-
ing that it can guarantee real-time data delivery, so there
is no danger of inaccurately ordered or delayed frames.
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What Is The Difference Between FireWire
400 And FireWire 800?
Essentially, the main difference between the two in-
terfaces is speed. FireWire 800 effectively doubles the
bandwidth of the original FireWire 400 interface. The
new FireWire 800 interface offers truly impressive re-
sults, with speeds up to 800Mb/s for a single bus, and
even greater for several buses in RAID 0 configura-
tions.
Other key advancements include the support of in-
creased cabling distances and a newly enhanced arbitra-
tion architecture.
Utilizing cables constructed of professional-grade
glass optical fiber, when both devices are connected via
a FireWire 800 hub, FireWire 800 can burst data across
100 meters of cable.
The new arbitration scheme greatly improves on the
existing architecture by incorporating advanced 8B10B
data encoding (based on codes used by Gigabit Ether-
net and Fibre Channel), which reduces signal distortion,
and also improves the arbitration time by prepping the
arbitration while the current data packet is being sent,
so that data is sent as soon as the current transmission
is completed.
What Are The Ideal Uses For FireWire?
FireWire helped fuel a revolution for digital content
creators, and was awarded a 2001 Primetime Emmy En-
gineering Award by the Academy of Television Arts &
Sciences for its contribution. Due to its high bandwidth
and support of both isochronous and asynchronous data
delivery, FireWire has found a very successful place in
both the computer and consumer electronics industries.
Whether connecting game consoles, personal video
recorders, home stereo equipment, digital TVs, hard
drives, CD/DVD-RW drives, printers, scanners, tape
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5. FireWire Questions & Answers
