OEM Products on the Way

Fans of the IEEE 1394a FireWire interface used to brag about its 400Mbps speed, especially when the rival USB spec puttered along at 12Mbps. Lately, however, USB 2.0 products capable of 480Mbps data transfer have been everywhere. How fast will FireWire strike back? Try 800Mbps, as offered by the industry's first shipping 1394b silicon from Texas Instruments.

TI says its TSB81BA3 ($12.50 in 1,000-unit quantities) is a three-port bilingual physical layer device (PHY), to be joined later in the first quarter of the year by the TSB82AA2 link layer device -- the latter compatible with the Open Host Controller Interface 1.1 standard, ensuring compatibility with PC and Mac host systems with PCI buses.

The 1394b spec not only doubles FireWire's speed to 800Mbps -- the reason Apple Computer, which built it into the new 17-inch-screened PowerBook G4, calls it FireWire 800 -- but increases communication distances from 4.5 meters to a maximum 100 meters (using glass optic cabling).