February 16, 2007 -- The 1394 Trade Association announced that it has established a new task group to develop an IEEE 1394 baseband over coaxial cable PMD specification for use across a wide range of automotive, residential, and industrial networking applications.
The task group will work under the auspices of the 1394 Trade Association's Silicon Working Group, with support from the group's Automotive Working Group. It will be chaired by Les Baxter, a veteran member of the Trade Association who is the founder of Baxter Enterprises and chair of the IEEE P1394r committee, which is updating and revising the entire suite of IEEE 1394 standards.
A prototype of this technology has been demonstrated by Eqcologic NV, a 1394 Trade Association member company.
Baxter said the task group will create two documents - a requirements document and the PMD specification, which will include power options as well as the electrical transmission specification. Proposed performance will be bi-directional at data rates of 800 Mbits/sec over 18 meters of coax with up to five inline connectors.
Development of the 1394 baseband over coax specification will complement the coax bridge and UTP PMD specifications already developed by the 1394 Trade Association.
Baxter said, "The baseband coax PMD will be a simple, low-cost interface that will provide high throughput in harsh EMC environments while using economical coaxial cables and standard connectors. The baseband coax interface also will have the potential to support higher data rates and/or longer distances."
According to the Trade Association, the IEEE 1394 standard is an optimal method for delivering high quality audio and video, because the bandwidth required for A/V streaming is guaranteed, and because 1394 uses a reference clock to maintain optimal A/V signal synchronization.