Digital Interface controls input or/and output for digital signals. Largely, we are talking about audio/video signals that produce crisp high definition images and high quality sound.
The High-definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) HDMI provides an interface between any audio/video source, such as a set-top box, DVD player, gaming consoles or A/V receiver and an audio and/or video monitor, such as a digital television (DTV) while Digital Visual Interface (DVI) is a display interface that supports data transfer from a PC to a flat panel display in digital format.
PCI Express will replace PCI, PCI-X and AGP where they exist in computing platforms. A number of revolutionary form factors and connectors will enable entirely new application spaces. The ExpressCard standard authored by PCMCIA will ultimately replace the CardBus slot as the most common after-market I/O expansion slot for notebooks and sealed-box desktop PCs.
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a serial bus standard to interface devices. It was designed for computers, but it is now commonplace on keyboards, gamepads and joysticks, scanners, digital cameras, printers, external storage, networking components. USB was designed to allow peripherals to be connected without the need to plug expansion cards into the computer's ISA, EISA, or PCI bus, and to improve plug-and-play capabilities by allowing devices to be hot-swapped.
A SerDes transceiver (Serializer/Deserializer) takes byte or word wide data, converts it into a serial data stream and then transmits it over a differential media from point A to point B. This significantly reduces the number of signal paths and offers duplex data rates in the tens of gigabaud data rate. The deserializer, or DES, works in reverse as it takes the serial data, decodes it and converts it back to a parallel data interface along with a "recovered" data clock.
FireWire is one of the fastest peripheral standards ever developed, which makes it suitable for use with multimedia peripherals such as digital video cameras and other high-speed devices like the latest hard disk drives and printers. FireWire is a cross-platform implementation of the high-speed serial data bus defined by the IEEE 1394 group of standards. IEEE 1394, an international standard, provides a digital interface to integrate entertainment, communication, and computing electronics into consumer multimedia.
by Miguel Rodriguez, PLX Technology The concept of direct-memory access (DMA) isn’t new; for years now, processors and chipset makers have been implementing DMA as part of their efforts to increase system performance.