The technology division of India’s largest IT group, HCL Corporation, has licensed intellectual property rights in the P1394a serial bus standard to Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, according to Indian magazine Rediff. The Korean semiconductor maker exhibited P1394a Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chips based on soft cores at the P1394a trade association in California last month. Over 400 million P1394a chips are expected to be produced world wide by 2000. PCs, peripherals, set-top boxes and digital TVs will be the major market sectors for the chips. The P1394a serial bus is based on the IEEE 1394-1395 standard – also the basis of the ‘firewire’ home networking interface developed by Sony Corp and Apple Computer Corp – the P1394a supports data transfer speeds from 100Mbps to 400Mbps.
