IEEE-1394 cable assemblies (also known as FireWire)

Firewire cables and technology (customerservice@L-com.com)

Firewire is an interface type that's been growing in popularity. Like USB, it is usually used to connect peripheral devices to computers, but it is also sometimes used to connect peripheral devices together with no computer in between. Because IEEE-1394 isn't asynchronous like USB is, you don't need a processor to manage the signals.

Does that mean that Firewire is "better" than USB? Not really, it's just different. Really, USB is far more popular right now, and maybe for that reason Firewire is often confused with USB.

Here in L-com's tech support department, we sometimes get the question, : "How do I convert USB to Firewire." But unfortunately, we don't know any easy way to do that. The problem is that USB is very different from Firewire, like two different languages. The cost to design a device that would convert one media to another is more expensive than the cost to just buy a Firewire PCI card and put it in your computer. So, if you have Firewire devices that you need to plug into a computer with only USB ports, you should probably consider getting a Firewire card to give you the proper ports.

There's been a lot of talk recently about the new Firewire 800 or IEEE-1394b standard and products for it. Right now, we're carrying an assortment of cable assemblies to meet the standard, and as demand grows we will add more products to support 800Mbps devices.