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 1394 device is the cycle master, assignment of isochronous channel ID, and notification of errors. Bus management is built upon IEEE 1212 standard register architecture.
Asynchronous transport is the traditional computer memory-mapped, 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 1394 features a unique isochronous data channel interface. Isochronous data channels provide guaranteed data transport at a pre-determined rate. Much like LANs and WANs, IEEE 1394 is defined by the high level application interfaces that use it, not a single physical implementation. Therefore as new silicon technologies allow high higher speeds, longer distances, and alternate media, IEEE 1394 will scale to enable new applications.