FireBoard 400
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Features
Physical Layer

  • Supports Provisions of IEEE-1394 Standard and the 1394a-2000 Supplement for High Performance Serial Bus.
  • Provides Three Fully Compliant Cable Ports at 100/200/400 Megabits per Second.
  • Cable Ports Monitor Line Conditions for Active Connection to Remote Node.
  • 25.576 MHz Crystal Oscillator and PLL Provide Transmit/Receive Data at 100/200/400 Megabits per Second, and Link-Layer Controller Clock at 50 MHz.
  • Node Power-Class Information Signaling for System Power Management.
  • Cable Power Presence Monitoring.

Link Layer and PCI Interface
  • Performs the Function of aIl IEEE-1394 Cycle Master.
  • Supports IEEE-1394 Transfer Rates of 100, 200 and 400 Megabits per Second.
  • Provides PCI Bus Master Function for Supporting DMA Operations.
  • Compliant with PCI Specification 2.1.
  • Supports Distributed DMA Transfers between 1394 and Local Bus RAM, ROM,AUX, or Zoomed Video
  • Extension Headers for the Local Bus
  • Autoboot mode capability that allows data-moving systems to be designed to operate on the PCI bus without the need for a host CPU.

Extension Capabilities FireBoard 400 can be extended in functionality and operability. This can be achieved combining the Autoboot mode capability and the Extension Headers of the Local Bus. You can design your custom system based on the PCILynx local bus as a biggy-back board attached to the FireBoard 400.

The package contains:
  • One FireBoardT400 PCI adapter
  • ubCore (Unibrain's 1394 core technology)
  • FireNetNT4 (1394 Networking driver for Windows NT 4.0 ONLY)
  • Fire-i (1394 camera & control Utility)
  • FireAPI/Fire-iAPI (ubCore) license

Unibrain's FireBoard400 Host Adapter 
brings high-performance IEEE-1394 (firewire, i-Link) technology to PCI systems.

FireBoardT 400 Design Issues

Logic Design
The entire design of Unibrain's FireBoardT400 is based on two main IEEE-1394 chip-sets:

the Texas Instruments TSB41LAB3 IEEE-1394 400Mbps PHY layer transceiver and
the Texas Instruments TSB12LV21B (PCILynx-2) IEEE-1394 link controller to PCI bus.

PCB Design
The FireBoardT400 card is a four-layer printed circuit PCI board. Two of the layers provide the signal interconnections (signal layers) while the remaining two layers provide the required power and ground interconnections (plane layers).

External Power Supply
The FireBoardT400 has an has an optional power connector in order to receive the cable power not only from the +12V of the PCI connector but also from an external power connector provided by the host PC power supply.


OS Supported
 Windows NT4/98SE/Me/2000/XP