Cypress Semiconductor Rolls USB Microcontrollers

Electronic News, April 17, 2000 by Arik Hesseldahl

Cypress Semiconductor Corp. today will announce plans to sample a line of 48MHz Universal Serial Bus (USB) microcontrollers that the company says it will position for deployment into mass storage, wireless local area networks, video, digital subscriber line equipment, cable modems, scanners, and printers. Dubbed EZ-USB FX, the product family expands upon previous generations of Cypress USB microcontrollers by adding faster input/output, direct memory access, internal FIFO's, and general programmable interface. The company said interfaces to the part can be configured to be glueless to ASICs, digital signal processors, or standard interfaces, such as ATAPI, UTOPIA, or EPP (enhanced parallel port), wireless local area network chipsets, and HomePNA chipsets. The internal FIFOs can be configured to an 8-bit or 16-bit datapath and allow master or slave operation. The company said the part also lays the groundwork for Cypress microcontrollers to meet the USB 2.0 standard when it is approved later this year. The target data transfer speed for USB 2.0 is 480Mbits/sec., or about 40 times the speed of the current USB 1.1 standard that transfers data at 12Mbits/sec. The products are sampling now with production volumes expected by July. The family includes seven different parts in packages of 52 PQFP, 80 PQFP, and 128 PQFP. The parts will be priced from $6.88 to $8.13 each in lots of 1,000.

Malleable Launches VoATM and VoIP Processors

Malleable Technologies is set to announce today availability of the MECA (Malleable Embedded Communications Accelerator) family of high-density voice processors for Voice over asynchronous transfer mode (VoATM) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) equipment. The MECA processors, the company said, are designed to bridge legacy voice networking gear with the new higher-speed data networks by converting voice traffic into compressed ATM or IP packets. The company said each MECA device can process up to 96 channels of compressed voice or 512 channels of uncompressed voice, including ATM or IP packetization. The MECA architecture integrates the digital signal processor (DSP) and packet processing functions and replaces more than 10 existing devices including eight general-purpose DSP chips typically used in current designs, according to the company. The MECA family currently consists of two products a the MECA-4A for VoATM applications and the MECA-4I for VoIP applications. There are three firmware options for each product that determine the speech compression algorithm that's used. The MECA processors are programmable to enable voice coding and protocol upgrades through firmware. The company plans to position the parts for applications at the edge of the IP/ATM networks in high-density VoIP equipment like voice gateways, tandem routers, Multiservice Access Multiplexers, Integrated Access Devices, and third-generation wireless base station controllers. The MECA-4x processor family is sampling now. Direct pricing in 1,000-unit quantities ranges from $239 to $289 each for the MECA-4I and $279 to $329 each for the MECA-4A depending upon the firmware options chosen. All six devices are low-power 2.5-volt CMOS and rated for industrial temperature-range operation. All devices are fully pin-compatible and packaged in a 27mm x 27mm 316-pin PBGA. The company is also offering a compact PCI-based evaluator kit for $4,995.

Hitachi Ships 128Mbyte Micro DIMMs for Notebooks

Hitachi Semiconductor (America) Inc. announced a series of 144-pin Micro DIMMs (Dual In-line Memory Modules), offering what the company said is an industry-first 128Mbyte capacity for expansion memory in subnotebook PCs. This series employs what Hitchi called the world's smallest 64Mbit Synchronous DRAMs (SDRAMs) with a chip size of only 38mm square and Hitachi's proprietary Tape Carrier Package stacked-mounting technology.