By Ben Wilson
While Initio's first product to be released will operate at
800 Mbps, the 1394 Trade Association's roadmap calls for
eventual speeds of 3.2 gigabits per second.
Initio,
whose products include the bridge controllers vital to
developing FireWire host cards, has announced a round of
funding from an undisclosed private investor. The company said it plans to use its
newly secured capital to expand in what it sees as a rapidly
growing market for FireWire, the I/O standard invented by
Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and now managed by the
1394 Trade Association.
"With this new round of funding, [we]
will bolster application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)
research and development on SCSI -- including the emerging
Ultra320 SCSI (320MB/sec) interface -- and new IEEE 1394
devices," Initio officials said in a statement.
Company officials revealed to
NewsFactor that the new round of financing will help spur
development of a FireWire controller that can handle speeds of
up to 800 megabits per second -- double the current FireWire
transfer speed. "We are working on 1394B chips for
the 800-megabit FireWire specification for storage
applications," Eric Wilson, Initio's director of business
development, told NewsFactor, referring to the hard disk drive
business. Initio's current INIC-14xx series
includes ATA-to-1394a bridge controllers that allow OEMs to
connect ATAPI or EIDE devices to IEEE-1394a (FireWire)
interfaces. The implementation supports asynchronous transfers
at 100, 200 and 400 megabits per second, but it also calls for
speeds "beyond." The IEEE 1394B standard, which will
provide the basis for Initio's new controllers, has been in
development for more than two years. While Initio's first product to
support 1394B will operate at 800 megabits per second, the
1394 Trade Association's roadmap calls for speeds of 1.6
gigabits per second and, eventually, 3.2 gigabits per second
over copper wire. Working at distances of up to 100 feet, the
ultra-fast 3.2 gigabit-per-second version will require more
expensive multimode glass optical fiber wiring. IEEE 1394B includes a new connector
with better shielding and signal isolation. The new connector
promises to be more compact than earlier versions as well.
IEEE 1394b sports a new function
called BOSS (Bus Owner Supervisor Selector), which implements
overlapped, pipelined arbitration, so the arbitration protocol
runs in parallel with data transmissions. The current version of FireWire, IEEE
1394a, alternates between data transmission and arbitration.
Arbitration depends on round-trip transmission time, meaning
there are stiff bottlenecks, especially when there is a long
cable distance. The old FireWire arbitration scheme
also is not scalable, meaning that bottlenecks become
increasingly constrictive at higher speeds. Initio cited research stating that
the FireWire interface will be included in 112 million
computers and peripherals by 2004. With the 1394 Trade
Association reaping about 25 U.S. cents per FireWire device,
and Initio providing the bridge controllers that power many
FireWire storage products, both organizations seem poised to
capitalize on the burgeoning I/O standard.
Ultra-Fast FireWire Card in the Works
NewsFactor Network
March 12, 2002 
