A low-cost digital interface organized by Apple Computer as a desktop LAN and developed by the IEEE P1394 Working Group. Can transport data at 100, 200, or 400 Mbps. Serial bus management provides overall configuration control of the serial bus in the form of optimizing arbitration timing, guarantee of adequate electrical power for all devices on the bus, assignment of which IEEE P1394 device is the cycle master, assignment of isochronous channel ID, and notification of errors.

There are two types of IEEE P1394 data transfer: asynchronous and isochronous. Asynchronous transport is the traditional computer memorymapped, load and store interface. Data requests are sent to a specific address and an acknowledgment is returned. In addition to an architecture that scales with silicon technology, IEEE P1394 features a unique isochronous data channel interface. Isochronous data channels provide guaranteed data transport at a pre-determined rate. This is especially important for time-critical multimedia data where just-in-time delivery eliminates the need for costly buffering.