FireTrac - Positioning

At first sight the new FireTrac^TM might appear as a solution positioned right in-between the FireSpy® product line and DapTechnology’s series of Mil1394 (SAE AS5643) compatible OHCI - host adapter cards (as well as other implementations using the OHCI technology). While this is not entirely wrong it needs to be pointed out that FireTrac^TM is more than just a marriage of both.

FireTrac^TM has been designed from ground up to provide extended features and functionality in areas that are difficult to accomplish with COTS OHCI Link Layer devices (precise timing, …) without having the data analysis overhead of the FireSpy® architecture. The table below is intended to show the strengths of FireTrac^TM (middle) relative to the other two product groups:

Apart from its standard IEE1394 features, FireTrac^TM has been architectured to provide hardware level support for Mil1394 (SAE AS5643) which reduces host processor burden, specifically for packet encapsulation, data extraction, receive/transmit STOF offsets, etc…It is important to understand that FireTrac^TM is a dedicated and optimized solution for processing of AS5643-type traffic with support for the AS5643 protocol embedded within the hardware, as opposed to just a software layer implementation which is typically provided with other solutions relying on COTS OHCI chipsets.

click on table to further enlarge