FIREWIRE: THE NEW 1553?

Abstract

MIL-STD-1553 has served the flight community well. However, in recent years several new high-speed bus standards have emerged that outperform 1553 in various respects such as data throughput and increased address space. During this time, mission requirements - including video and audio - have become more data intensive. Although some of these busses were not initially designed for the avionics industry (such as Ethernet, FireWire, and FibreChannel), they are potentially of interest as high-speed commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions for both set-up and data acquisition. These busses offer not only improved overall system performance, in terms of aggregate sampling rates, but also simplify existing data acquisition system architectures. They require fewer high-bandwidth links which can serve for both set-up and data. This paper examines some of these issues, focusing in particular on IEEE1394, better known as FireWire.