This Story Posted:
April 9th

 
 

[1:50 PM]
FireWire Consortium Keen On The Future
The 1394 Trade Association thinks that the future is very bright for FireWire. In a press release aimed at bolstering public awareness for FireWire, the Consortium backed up these feelings with statements from many of the companies involved with FireWire products.

"IEEE 1394 FireWire is poised to become the most widely used industry standard to interconnect consumer electronics and personal computer devices," said Jon Rubenstein, senior vice president of hardware engineering at Apple Computer. "Our new Power Macintosh G3 systems integrate FireWire as standard and Mac customers are already snapping up the FireWire-compatible digital imaging and storage devices that are flooding into the market."

"TI is now seeing a significant increase in demand for our 1394 silicon and software products in 1999, with all indicators pointing to a very good year 2000," said Harry Davoody, vice president, Texas Instruments, Inc. "PC peripherals makers around the world are ramping up to introduce 1394 products in 1999, with multiple vendors supplying scanners, printers, desktop cameras and mass storage devices."

According to Paul Nahi, general manager of the multimedia and consumer groups at NEC Electronics, "NEC's standards-compliant 1394 Open HCI LSI device is now in volume shipments, and is being used by notebook and PC card vendors. NEC also is planning to introduce products for home multimedia applications, such as the long-distance 1394 physical layer which will be used in residential gateways."

Jay Kelbley of Eastman Kodak also is optimistic about the standard's growth this year. "Kodak sees FireWire as the high bandwidth connectivity solution and we are currently shipping several models of our professional cameras with the standard built in," he said. "As performance requirements for peripherals increase, you will see more and more products from Kodak that incorporate it."

HP believes that USB and 1394 will both be required in future printing and scanning needs," said Mark Fidler, senior engineer scientist for HP's Network Peripherals Solutions Division. "We will definitely need the high functionality and performance of 1394."

"Epson has plans to offer a FireWire connectivity solution in 1999 for use with our high-end color ink jet printers," said Jay Shears, director, printer product marketing, Epson. "Our products are known for outstanding color performance, and as we continue to introduce faster printers with superior image quality FireWire will provide the improved performance and greater flexibility in printing applications. The multi-host topology of FireWire will also allow for the sharing of our peripherals in small workgroups."

The 1394 Trade Association includes the heaviest hitters in the industry including Apple Computer, Compaq, Lucent, IBM Microelectronics, AMD, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Sony, Matsushita Electric, Molex, NEC Electronics, Philips, Sun Microsystems, 3A International, Yamaha, and Zayante.

The TA maintains web sites at www.1394ta.org and www.1394showcase.com.

The Mac Observer Spin: With Intel trying its best to try and make USB2 a competitor to FireWire, it is important for the 1394 Trade Association to make sure the world knows about how successful FireWire already is. Intel's efforts are probably useless as USB2 can't even match the performance of the current FireWire standard, let alone upcoming FireWire technologies.

1394 Trade Association