NEC Corp has developed new semiconductors designed to speed up data transmission between PCs and wireless data devices. The 400Mbp/s combination chips are based around the latest IEEE 1394 (nee Firewire) draft specification, P1394a version 2.0. The chips combine the 1394 OpenHCI Link Layer and physical layer protocols – such as TCP/IP, cutting out the need for separate chipsets. NEC – one of the few peripheral manufacturers which currently produces a wide range of Universal signal Bus (USB) compliant devices – say that it sees the USB-compatible chips as the next step in multimedia data transmission. The 0.35 micron process chips expected to be available in the first half of 1999.
