Providing consumer electronics designers with advanced functionality to communicate audio/video (A/V) data across a 1394 (FireWire®) network, Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) announced a new cost-effective, integrated 1394a link-layer-controller and two-port physical-layer-controller (PHY). This cost-effective technology, which has a PCI host interface option, gives designers of multi-media applications, such as set-top boxes, DVD player/recorder, digital TV and digital VCR, an off-the-shelf component that facilitates the communication of compressed A/V data (i.e. DV, MPEG-TS, DirecTV TS) and digital audio according to the IEC61883 standard. (See www.ti.com/sc04111 for more information.)
The TSB43DA42 and TSB43DB42 Link and PHY each includes three high speed data interface (HSDI) ports. Each port, which supports I/O of data, is dedicated to an isochronous data path and can be independently configured to transmit/receive to and from 1394. Additionally, all three ports support seamless connections to the various codecs on the market. The integrated two-port PHY is capable of communicating at 400, 200 or 100 Mbps.
Equipped with digital transmission content protection (DTCP), the TSB43DA42 can handle all of the formatting of the IEC61883 packets. To do this, the device must first be configured by an external CPU which is connected to the host interface using either a PCI or SRAM/68K bus. The TSB43DB42 is pin-for-pin compatible with the TSB43DA42, but does not include DTCP.
When transmitting to the 1394 network, the codecs will be responsible for outputting the compressed data, and the device will generate and output the IEC61883 packet containing the data. When receiving data from the 1394 network, TSB43DA42 will remove the 1394 headers and timestamps from the IEC61883 packet and then output the compressed A/V data to the codec.
Key Features
- IEEE 1394a compliant
- DTCP (5C) content protection (TSB43DA42 only)
- Three data paths for isochronous data (4KB FIFO and DTCP cipher)
- 2-port PHY (400Mbps each)
- Controlled by external CPU using either PCI or SRAM/68K interface
- DMA engines to accelerate communication of SBP2 (serial bus protocol) transactions and OSD (on-screen display) data
Availability, Packaging and Pricing
The TSB43DA42 and the TSB43DB42 are available now in a 196-pin MicroStar BGATM 15x15mm package. Suggested resale pricing in quantities of 1,000 is $8.25 for the TSB43DA42 and $7.85 for the TSB43DB42.
