There's a new chip in that Quantum CE drive....
techweb.com
Sony's i.LINK chip protects encoded data
Mark Hachman
Silicon Valley- Sony Electronics Inc. has developed an IEEE 1394 chip with
integrated encryption to secure the transfer of copyrighted data.
At last week's Western Show cable exposition in Anaheim, Calif., Sony and
Quantum Corp. displayed prototypes of both the chip itself- called the
i.LINK-and a prototype hard drive with the chip built in.
Sony's copy protection, dubbed Digital Transmission Content Protection
(DTCP), is based on a technical proposal that was submitted to the Copyright
Protection Technical Working Group last February.
The two-way key system is designed to address concerns that
MPEG-2-encoded data, once decompressed, is vulnerable to piracy over a
1394 connection.
Sony's chip, expected to be produced in the first quarter of 1999, has not
been formally announced. However, a Sony spokesman in San Jose said the
chip will support bit rates ranging to 200 Mbits/s.
The relatively low MPEG-2 bit rate-about 2 to 6 Mbits/s-also allows a disk
drive to read one MPEG-2 stream while writing another within a set-top box,
said Jeff Klugman, director of marketing and business development for
Quantum's Consumer Electronics Storage Division, Milpitas, Calif.
Quantum has not yet committed to i.LINK-enabled disk drives, partly
because the new chip needs additional board space, thus requiring a bigger
chassis that might not fit in a PC.
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