Dial 1394 -- Consumer-IC suppliers help support serial-bus protocol.
Bill Arnold
05/17/1999 Electronic Buyers' News
Page 55
Copyright 1999 CMP Publications Inc.
Besides the "business as usual" pressures of providing more integration and higher performance at lower cost, manufacturers of consumer ICs must respond to the developing convergence of consumer, computing, and communications functions in an array of products.
How quickly this convergence will develop is a matter of some debate. "The PC isn't a consumer device yet, and is still a ways from being one," said Jodie Hughes, senior vice president and general manager at Sony Semiconductor Division, San Jose.
"The PC guys are groping to find where a PC fits in the home," he said. "PCs aren't apt for TV or games or set-top boxes, even with a PC-oriented PCI bus. And a $500 PC doesn't equate to a $200 consumer PlayStation," Hughes said, disputing those who claim that inexpensive PCs can be considered consumer products.
But such convergence is indisputably under way, countered Christopher N. Day, senior director of marketing, PC/Codec Division, at C-Cube Microsystems Inc., Milpitas, Calif. PC companies are beginning to incorporate video into PCs via DVD playback add-in cards for the U.S. market and TV tuner cards for the European market, he said.
"True, there is a big question of whether people will watch a movie on a PC, but a PC screen is a good place for DVD playback where user space is cramped, as it is in many parts of Europe," Day said. And tuner cards enable a user to keep a window open to scan TV while working on other projects, he added.
Serial-bus standard
But even as such debate plays itself out, standards are being developed to further develop multimedia convergence, and consumer-IC suppliers are producing various devices to support these standards.
Chief among them is IEEE-1394, which allows consumer-electronic and computing devices to interconnect and communicate via a common command set with plug-and-play ease, while providing performance to support high-quality audio and video applications. A protocol for a high-speed serial I/O bus, 1394 permits the transmission of multimedia data at up to 400 Mbits/s, and a 1394 port can connect up to 63 external peripherals.
When compared with older serial as well as parallel buses, 1394 provides more advanced features, such as live connection/disconnection of devices onto a 1394-based cable I/O system, or of boards into a 1394-based backplane. The standard also supports asynchronous and isochronous communication on the same system.
Formalized in August 1996, 1394 has not yet found its way into large numbers of consumer-electronic products, with the exception of digital cameras and some camcorders and DVDs, said Simon Dolan, vice president of consumer products marketing at LSI Logic Corp., Milpitas.
There are some significant recent developments, however, in regard to PCs. In the first quarter of this year, 300,000 PowerMac G3s with 1394 were shipped, and NEC Electronics Inc., Sony Electronics Inc., and a number of other PC OEMs have joined Compaq Computer Corp. in putting 1394 ports on their PCs, according to Allen Light, 1394 marketing and applications manager at Philips Semiconductors, Albuquerque, N.M.
Approximately 8 million to 10 million PCs will ship this year with 1394, and 40 million will ship with it next year, predicts Randy Trost, worldwide 1394 product marketing manager at Texas Instruments Inc., Dallas.
In March, TI announced its TSB12LV23, an Open Host Controller Interface (OHCI) link-layer chip. The chip complements TI's previously announced TSB41LV02, a low-power, 400-Mbit/s, two-port physical-layer device. Together, the two chips give designers of desktop and mobile PCs a way to help reduce final system costs when implementing 1394, Trost said.
"New PCs have been craving the digital audio/video content of today's consumer electronics, and our new [two-chip] solution allows the PC to implement applications ranging from home-video editing to Web-content creation," he said, adding that "five major PC OEMs" have already adopted TI's two-chip solution for their mainstream 1999 machines.
The TSB12LV23 comes in a 100-pin TQFP. Prices were not available.
Other 1394 introductions
In February, Philips Semiconductors introduced the PD11394L21, a full-duplex, 400-Mbit/s version of its 1394-1995-compliant audio-video link-layer controller. The enhanced version, according to Light, is higher-performing and is the first A/V link to support simple processor-based manipulation of MPEG-2 transport streams-the standard compression scheme for many set-top-box, storage, and digital-TV applications. (See sidebar on this page.)
"The controller's full-duplex, isochronous operation enables it to receive and transmit data packets simultaneously," Light said. "The advantage of this is in applications where users might want to access more than one function at a time, such as recording a program and playing a game," he said.
The PD11394L21 is priced at $8.50 in quantities of 10,000.
Among the 1394-enabled products now making their debut is a digital VCR with a 3.5-in. hard drive, said Patrick Yu, product marketing manager at NEC Electronics, Santa Clara, Calif. With 1394, the VCR's hard drive can record up to 63 channels-something that can't be done with SCSI or IDE interfaces, according to Yu.
NEC Electronics has been providing a number of ICs for OEMs to use in 1394-compliant products. Last November, the company announced its family of "combo," 400-Mbit/s devices that incorporate the 1394 OHCI link layer and physical layer on a single chip.
In January, the company announced that it will use Adaptec Inc.'s 1394 software with its OHCI chips, discrete chipset, and 400-Mbit/s PHY. The combination of software and hardware technologies will be targeted at desktop, portable, and peripherals applications, such as video capture and editing and CD-R authoring, said Yu, adding his belief-which seems to be widely shared-that 1394 will continue to emerge as the bus-protocol backbone for multimedia products.
Intel's shadow
Intel Corp., however, may have something to say about that. The Santa Clara-based microprocessor giant is working on an upgraded, faster version of the Universal Serial Bus that could offer 1394 a challenge-limiting its use in PCs and relegating it primarily to consumer boxes.
Sony's Hughes likes the idea of an upgraded USB because 1394's much higher data rates create some incompatibility with PCs' slower rates. Philips' Light adds that an enhanced USB is needed because the current USB runs out of bandwidth if too many peripherals are on the bus.
Intel itself is saying very little about the USB upgrade, promising details later this year. "The jury's out on what Intel's announcement might mean to the market," TI's Trost said. "There are unanswered questions about time frame, cost, bandwidth, and a future development road- map," he said.
And even after Intel announces more specifics, it will take one or two years for an enhanced USB to be developed, debugged, and manufactured, and another year or more before products containing the new product would be in production, Trost said. "Will the market wait for a new USB when 1394 meets the need for high bandwidth and is shipping now?" he asks.
-Bill Arnold is a freelance writer based in San Mateo, Calif.
May 17, 1999
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