IEEE 1394-2008

Revision Standard - Inactive-Reserved.

This standard provides specifications for a high-speed serial bus that supports both asynchronous and isochronous communication and integrates well with most IEEE standard 32-bit and 64-bit parallel buses.

It is intended to provide a low-cost interconnect between cards on the same backplane, cards on other backplanes, and external peripherals.

Interfaces to longer distance transmission media [such as unshielded twisted pair (UTP), optical fiber, and plastic optical fiber (POF)] allow the interconnection to be extended throughout a local network.

This standard follows the command and status register (CSR) architecture of IEEE Std 1212-2001.

This standard describes a high-speed, low-cost serial bus suitable for use as a peripheral bus, a backup to parallel backplane buses, or a local area network. Highlights of the serial bus include the following:

• Bus transactions that include both block and single quadlet reads and writes, as well as an "isochronous" mode that provides a low-overhead guaranteed bandwidth service.
• A fair bus access mechanism that guarantees all nodes equal access. The backplane environment adds a priority mechanism, but one that ensures that nodes using the fair protocol are still guaranteed at least partial access.
• Automatic assignment of node addresses—no need for address switches.
• A physical layer (PHY) supporting both long-haul and short-haul cable media and backplane buses.
• Variable speed data transmission based on ISDN-compatible bit rates from 24.576 Mbit/s for transistor-transistor logic (TTL) backplanes to 49.152 Mbit/s for backplane transceiver logic (BTL) backplanes. For the cable medium, data transmission rates of 98.304 Mbit/s (known as S100), S200, S400, S800, S1600, and S3200 are supported.
• A short-haul cable medium that allows up to 16 physical connections (cable hops), each up to 4.5 m, giving a total cable distance of 72 m between any two devices. Bus management recognizes smaller configurations to optimize performance.
• A long-haul cable medium that permits connections up to 100 m in length over unshielded twisted pair (UTP) cable and glass optical fiber (GOF) and up to 50 m over plastic optical fiber (POF).
• Consistency with ISO/IEC 13213:1994 (IEEE Std 1212, 1994 Edition).

This standard incorporates the contents of IEEE Std 1394™-1995 as revised by IEEE Std 1394a™-2000, IEEE Std 1394b™-2002, and IEEE Std 1394c™-2006.

In addition, over 100 errata have been corrected, and several new features have been added per Q.12.