TED announces joint development with Cypress of USB 3.0 device interface card

YOKOHAMA, JAPAN: Cypress Semiconductor Corp. and Tokyo Electron Device Ltd (TED) have jointly developed a USB 3.0 device interface card. The inrevium TB-FMCL-USB30, available from TED, utilizes Cypress's EZ-USB FX3 controller to implement the new SuperSpeed USB and achieve a data rate of 5 Gbps, ten times that of USB 2.0.

The TB-FMCL-USB30 is an FPGA mezzanine card (FMC) that connects to a PC interface capable of a maximum data rate of 5 Gbps. It utilizes the Cypress EZ-USB FX3 device which supports SuperSpeed USB implementation. The TB-FMCL-USB30 allows on-board testing of USB 3.0 to be conducted simply by connecting it to the mother board.

The accompanying reference design allows access to the slave peripherals supporting AMBA 4 AXI4 (Advanced eXtensible Interface 4) implemented in a Xilinx FPGA, and users can take advantage of the Xilinx Embedded Development Kit (EDK) to simplify the addition of a USB 3.0 interface into AXI4-based FPGA designs. The TB-FMCL-USB30 is released under TED's inrevium brand.

The EZ-USB FX3 is one of the first USB 3.0 peripheral controllers in the industry, and the only programmable solution to date. It is equipped with a fully configurable General Programmable Interface (GPIF II) capable of supporting data rates up to 400 MBps. GPIF II enables FX3 to interface directly with any processor, ASIC or FPGA. The GPIF Designer, a graphical user interface (GUI) tool kit, helps system designers to configure the GPIF interface to their needs.

Several popular system interfaces are provided as examples, including FIFO, SRAM, asynchronous and synchronous multiplexed address/data. The on-chip ARM9 CPU core with 512KB RAM delivers 200 MIPS of computational power and is available for applications that require local data processing. Additionally, FX3 provides interfaces to connect to serial peripherals such as SPI, UART, I2C and I2S. In short, FX3 provides highly flexible and integrated features that enable developers to add USB 3.0 connectivity to any system.

"We are glad to see a leader such as TED providing a timely USB 3.0 solution to enable the SuperSpeed market," said Mark Fu, senior director of Cypress's SuperSpeed USB Business Unit. "The FPGA mezzanine card with EX-USB FX3 is an excellent example of USB 3.0 enablers that will drive USB 3.0 adoption into many embedded applications."

Yasuo Hatsumi, VP, Solution Business, TED, said: "We are pleased to have worked together with Cypress, who have already introduced various USB products into the market, for the development of a USB 3.0 interface card, which is now becoming widely spread for PC's and home electronic appliances. TED will continue to place an emphasis on the collaboration with our partners to push forward new solution proposals to enable quicker FPGA development."

The TB-FMCL-USB30 is marketed directly by TED for a diverse range of embedded applications that require a USB 3.0 interface, with a target of annual sales of 1,000 boards in 2014. The motherboards of this interface card available from TED to which the TB-FMCL-USB30 can be connected consist of evaluation platforms fitted with the Virtex-6 FPGA or Spartan-6 FPGA as well as the Kintex-7 ACDC1.0 base board released in January 2012. An evaluation platform with a Virtex-7 FPGA is also currently under development.