Stmicro Intro Dev Kit; Provides Cheap Solution For Designers Of Usb Flash Card Writers - ST92163-DEMO/MS microcontroller - Brief Article - Product Announcement

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Nov 26, 2001

STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM) has introduced a turn-key development kit that offers designers a solution for rapid development of low-cost flash memory-card writers that plug into a PC's Universal Serial Bus (USB) port.

The resulting card writers can have single or multiple card slots and need no ASIC or external program or data memory.

The ST92163-DEMO/MS kit is based on the ST92163 12 Mbit/s USB microcontroller (MCU) and includes device firmware, a demonstration board and schematic diagrams. It offers OS kernel driver support for Windows 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP and Macintosh PCs. The reference design interfaces to the most popular flash card formats: Compact Flash, SmartMedia, Secure Digital (SD) and Multimedia (MMC), Sony Memory Stick, as well as NAND flash chips.

Products developed using ST92163-DEMO/MS can serve as USB-based PC peripherals that accept popular flash cards--non-volatile mass storage media--for writing or reading electronic images, digital music files, programs, and data. The need for such peripherals has exploded with the popularity of digital still cameras, MP3 music players, cellular phones, personal digital assistants, and other handheld devices that use flash memory cards for non-volatile storage. Because the peripherals look to the PC like removable drives, these flash memory cards can also provide back-up storage for conventional programs and data.

The ST92163-DEMO/MS kit and has been fully plug tested by the international USB Compliance Workshop and is included on the list of USB software integrators. The solution is available now and key OEMs in USA, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Singapore are already producing card writers using this platform.