FireLink^® Basic consists of a fully IEEE-1394b-2008 compliant Link Layer implementation. All LLC related functional blocks ensure functional standards compliance as well as interoperability with off-the-shelf physical layer devices (assuming PHY layer I/O compliance).

Essential to FireLink^® Basic is its very simple host connectivity. Via simple 32 bit data/address bus R/W operations as well as control registers. Updates can be handled via a dual-ported RAM or direct register access. Since any communication with this DPRAM is host processor driven this interface is optimized for small/medium sized data (isochronous, asynchronous and PHY layer) packets as well as low bandwidth requirements. Just like sending large amounts of data via the I/O bus, an increased number of individual bus transactions negatively affect the overall interface performance. For transmission and reception of large isochronous streams (e.g. video and/or audio) alternate data paths are available by means of the ISO Transmit and Receive Ports. They allow connecting dedicated data generating/processing hardware directly to the transmit/receive engines of FireLink^®.  As these dedicated ports are bypassing the host main processor they are not restricted by performance limitations of the main host interface and therefore guarantee optimized data rates.

An additional benefit is the ability to customize several functional elements of the core. Since not all 1394 implementations require a full-featured 1394 interface (e.g. a pure IPv4 (IP over 1394) or AS5643 implementation using only asynchronous messaging can reduce FPGA footprint requirements by leaving out certain functional blocks like isochronous data ports, Cycle Timer and transmit, etc. from the deployed netlist. Likewise, an isochronous data transmitting video camera can omit a RX iso port as it is a dedicated data streaming device and the general purpose RX and TX buffer can be held small.