Een aantal Europese autofabrikanten hebben een voor auto's ontwikkelde variant van de 1394 FireWire bus voorgesteld, genaamd IDB-1394. De snelle seriële FireWire bus zal gebruikt worden om multimedia apparatuur, navigatie sysemen, video schermen, GSM's en andere troep in te pluggen op het netwerk van de auto (schijnt tegenwoordig ook al een LANnetje in te liggen ). Voordat de IDB-1394 technologie daadwerkelijk in auto's toegepast zal worden, moeten de specs goedgekeurd worden door de Automotive Multimedia Interface Collaboration, een samenzwering van 12 grote autofabrikanten waaronder BMW, Daimler-Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Honda en Volkswagen:
Car manufacturers now complain that they must often reengineer vendor products, which are not designed to any specific standard. As a result, they lose valuable development time and risk falling behind the rate of innovation in the electronics industry.IDB-1394 could help by offering car makers a high-speed fiber optic bus that takes advantage of widely used technology. "The idea is to leverage the economies of scale that you get from 1394 technology and incorporate them into automotive applications," said Frank Desjarlais, a network systems engineer for Ford Motor Co. who wrote the draft IDB-1394 specification along with Brad Little, an engineer with Texas Instruments Inc.
[...] Eight months in the making, the IDB-1394 spec was fashioned with input from Ford, General Motors and Toyota, as well as from makers of consumer devices such as Sony and Panasonic. "There's been agreement between the auto manufacturers and the consumer electronics giants that it's in their best interest to work together on this," said Max Bassler of Molex Inc. (Lisle, Ill.), vice chairman of the 1394 Trade Association. "They want to leverage 1394 technology."
Whether IDB-1394 will be endorsed in the AMIC specification is still open to question. AMIC board members said that technical issues must first be resolved before IDB-1394 can be endorsed. In particular, engineers question whether IDB-1394 meets the electromagnetic interference capabilities needed for an automotive environment, and whether it will meet temperature specs.
Meer info vind je in dit artikel van EETimes.