1998-09-21 , E/IC-1033/65
Product News From Philips Semiconductors

Consumer electronic products are going digital and the standard to interconnect them is the IEEE 1394 bus, which is capable of handling high speed data transfer of video and audio information. As one of the pioneers of IEEE 1394, Philips Semiconductors, the largest European semiconductor company, has produced the 1394 Reference Design Kit (RDK), which makes it very easy for designers to incorporate IEEE 1394 technology into their products. These include digital video cameras, digital video recorders, DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) players, set top boxes, and personal computers with powerful multimedia capabilities.

The RDK forms part of the company's systems approach and contains all the hardware and software needed to design a 1394 node, which is particularly useful as the same piece of equipment can be used throughout the design and testing process. It can be easily linked to related products from the company, such as MPEG2 decoders, digital video decoders and multimedia processors, to provide all the building blocks needed for complete systems. This fully featured kit has been priced at only US$ 395 to encourage designers to access the benefits of using it, i.e. ease of use, rapid prototyping and fast time to market.

The kit is based on Philips Semiconductors' advanced 1394 chipset and allows designers to test various design options - the board even includes a breadboard area for prototyping with LEDs to show what is happening. The flexible set-up makes it very easy to gain experience with IEEE 1394. For example, demonstrating MPEG2 transport over 1394 simply involves connecting the MPEG2 stream to the board via a ribbon cable.

The on-board microcontroller runs a complete transaction layer, complementing the Physical and Link layers, with ROM and RAM available for downloading user applications. The software is written in 'C' and includes the transaction layer source code, which is provided royalty free. This speeds up software development and understanding as the software can be modified as required. A monitoring program for PCs offers various settings and functions, and allows access to chip registers along with on-screen monitoring of asynchronous transactions to provide simple verification of transaction layer software functionality.

As a known working platform, the RDK neatly solves the dilemma of whether a fault lies in hardware or software and, in the final development stages, the RDK is particularly useful as a known working debugging node for testing hardware implementation.

The kit has been developed by Philips Semiconductors in conjunction with the Vitana Corporation and further information can be found on  www.vitana.com/philips/datasht.htm.

Philips Semiconductors, a division of Royal Philips Electronics, headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, is the ninth largest semiconductor supplier in the world and the third largest supplier of discretes in the world. Philips Semiconductors' innovations in digital audio, video, and mobile technology position the company as a leader in the consumer, multimedia and wireless communications markets. Sales offices are located in all major markets around the world and are supported by systems labs.