NEC Corp. announced Wednesday that it has developed its first prototype of a device that is expected to be the backbone of high-speed multimedia networks in homes of the future.
The device -- a switch LSI for the IEEE1394 serial bus standard -- will enable a personal computer, for example, to be hooked up to as many as eight digital video cameras of a home security system, NEC said.
The device will also enable wireless data transfer at high speeds and help build long-distance data transfer systems of over 1 km.
An increasing number of digital home electronics gadgets now support the so-called IEEE 1394 global standard for transfer of a large volume of video and audio data.
But because of differences in data transfer speeds in different types of equipment and other technical difficulties, personal computers are only capable of handling data transfer from up to two DVCs, NEC said.
The LSI, which NEC hopes to put on the market by the end of this year, has overcome these difficulties by enabling high-speed data transfer from DVCs to a personal computer.
NEC plans to initially market the device to professional users who, for instance, want to edit video data simultaneously fed by several DVCs. It later plans to offer a device, priced at around 10,000 yen, to nonprofessional users as well, the company said.