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TOKYO - NEC Corp. has developed a single-chip IEEE-1394 switch that the company said will make the high-speed interface act less like an erratic bus and more like a well-behaved network. Initially the prototype chip will be aimed at high-bandwidth users like video and music editing studios, though in coming years NEC expects the device to work its way into the backbone of home networks.
While IEEE 1394 has been widely used to link digital devices in a peer-to-peer fashion, it is still not robust enough to act as a true network interface, said Shuntaro Yamazaki, senior manager of NEC's Computer and Communications Media Research division (Kawasaki, Japan).
"1394 is known for being a broadband serial bus for consumer devices, but it doesn't have enough bandwidth for accommodating digital video content or high-speed Internet packets," Yamazaki said. "We have to make it more efficient as...