Newlink 3 Port Firewire PCI Card

Add Firewire capability to your PC using a spare PCI slot and the Newlink Firewire PCI Host Card. Suitable for all firewire applications including connecting an Apple iPod
For laptops please see our Firewire PCMCIA card

Features include:-
- Compliant with IEEE 1394-1995, P1394a (rev 1.1) and OHCI Spec v1.0
- Suitable for connecting an Apple iPod.
- 3 x IEEE 1394 6P Type (Female) ports
- Supports 100, 200, and 400 Mbit/s transmission
- Easily connect your Digital camcorder, VCRs, DVDs etc
- Link up to 63 devices
- Supports host Plug and Play

System requirements:-
- Windows 98Se, ME, 2000 and above or
- Mac OS 8.6 or above
- 64MB of RAM or above
- Pentium 233 MMX or above

Contents includes:-
- IEEE 1394 PCI Host Adaptor
p>Firewire background
IEEE 1394 defines two bus categories: backplane and cable. The backplane bus provides an alternative serial communication path for parallel bus devices plugged into the backplane. The bus discussed in this White Paper is the cable bus: a ""non-cyclic network with finite branches"" consisting of bus bridges and nodes (cable devices). ôNon-cyclicö means you cant plug devices together to create loops. A ôbus bridgeö connects between buses: a 1394-to-PCI interface within a PC, for example. The 16-bit addressing provides up to 64K nodes in a system, with up to 16 cable hops between each: thus the term ôfinite branchesö. Six-bit Node_IDs allow up to 63 nodes to be connected to a single bus bridge (the limit for a conventional FireWire-to-PC adapter card); ten-bit Bus_IDs allows up to 1,023 bridges in a system.

Each node normally has 3 connectors (the standard allows between 1 and 27). Up to 16 nodes can be daisy-chained up to 4.5 m through the connectors for a total standard cable length of 72 m (longer using higher-quality ""fatter"" cables). Extra devices can be connected in a leaf-node configuration, as shown in the figure. Physical addresses are assigned on bridge power up (bus reset), and whenever a node is added to or removed from the system. No device ID switches are required, and the nodes are hot pluggable, meaning that FireWire is a true plug-and-play bus.

The FireWire cable standard defines three signalling rates: 98.304, 196.608 and 393.216 Mbits/s. These are normally rounded up to 100, 200, and 400 Mbit/s, and often referred to as S100, S200 and S400. The signalling rate for the entire bus is usually governed by the slowest active node, but the bus can also support multiple signalling speeds between individual pairs.

The IEEE 1394 protocol covers layers 1, 2 and 3 (physical, link and transaction) of the ISOÆs seven-layer OSI model. The standard 6-conductor cable has two separately shielded twisted-pair transmission lines for signalling (crossed for transmit-receive), two power conductors (8 to 40 V, 1.5 A max.), and an overall shield. Transformer or low-cost capacitive coupling provides galvanic isolation (500 and 60 V respectively).

FireWire provides a flexible bus management system that connects between a wide range of devices, which do not need to include a PC or other bus controller. FireWireÆs isochronous data transport provides the guaranteed bandwidth and latency required for high-speed data transfer over multiple channels.