Inside Oxford Semiconductor & The Oxford 911 FireWire Bridge

Oxford got its start in England, making application specific integrated circuits (ASICis) for customers to their specifications. As the company began to build and market its own standard chipsets, USB was all the rage.

"USB was coming along at that point, but we could see some issues with USB in that there were lots of manufacturers moving into that field, and support issues were not terribly good. As we guessed, the chip prices really got fought down before the market even developed fully. We were glad that we overlooked that one. At that point the specs for FireWire, for 1394 were just being defined, so we decided weid be first to market with that rather than last to market with USB." The company didnit ignore USB entirely though. "The onset of legacy free PCis has meant thereis been a big aftermarket requirement for serial and parallel ports to connect. […] Weive had our chips used in things like serial to USB adapters for the iMac."

Right now though the focus is firmly on FireWire. The 911 is the companyis 2nd generation IDE to FireWire bridge chipset, the first being the 900 which entered the market at the tail end of 1999. "[It] was quite a major step in terms of integration because it has a RISC processor, an ARM processor." ARM being the same Apple held British company responsible for the StrongARM processor that was used in the late Newton PDA.