|
 |
connectivityZONE Products for the week of January 28, 2008
MosChip Says…
PCIe to Peripheral I/O Controller with Support for Serial, Parallel, ISA and USB Interfaces and Standards
MosChip Semiconductor Technology Ltd., a leading provider of high performance connectivity solutions for consumer, industrial and computing applications, today announced the world wide availability of a single-chip, single-lane PCI Express (PCIe) to peripheral controller with support for serial, parallel, ISA and USB interfaces and standards. Already in use by some customers, the solution comes with a comprehensive system design package. The MCS9901CV is the world’s first PCIe to peripheral I/O controller to have more than 21 combinations of Serial, Parallel, USB and ISA interface options. The product is ideal for PCIe-based Serial or Parallel port expansion through add-in cards for server OEMs, PCI Express Cards and PC peripheral manufacturers, embedded motherboard applications and industrial controls.
The product, MosChip’s MCS9901CV PCIe to Peripheral I/O Controller, is fully compliant with the PCIe base specification revision 1.0a. It boasts four 16C550/16C550Ex compatible UART channels; 256 Byte FIFO for transmit and receive paths in each serial port; and supports RS232, RS485 and RS422 modes and slow IrDA. The MCS9901CV also provides bi-directional speeds from 50 bps to 16 Mbps per port and full serial modem control and custom baud rate support. In addition, it supports hardware and software flow control as well as 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 bit Serial data format support and even, odd, mark, space and no parity.
MosChip’s MCS9901CV is also offered with comprehensive design support:
- Software driver suite with available source code for Microsoft Vista / XP / 2000 / 98 / CE, Apple Mac OS, Linux and DOS
- Wide range of PCIe peripheral I/O card designs
- Gerber and Protel system schematics and other supporting documentation
- World-class support with comprehensive system design services
"We are pleased to have participated as an early adopter of the new MosChip MCS9901CV feature rich PCIe controller,” said Kumar Bhatia, CTO at Axxon Computer Corporation. “Many of the required functions for our projects are now available through this single chip device. Our company perceives a strategic value in the deployment of the MCS9901CV component for our next generation of designs. This new alliance between MosChip and our company will allow us to maintain the competitive lead in the PCI Express add- on peripheral market."
“MosChip’s new PCIe to peripheral I/O controller and design support has helped us tremendously to introduce our product to market in record time,” said Mr. Paka Leung, President of Speed Dragon Multimedia, Inc. “From the time we received the MCS9901CV samples and design support package we were able to get a production ready design to market in less than two weeks.”
"Sunrich Technology is pleased to be the first-to-market with its PCI Express-Quad port Serial controller using this innovative MosChip MCS9901CV," said Dr. Samuel Chih, CEO of Sunrich Technology (US), Inc. "This highly integrated and highly reliable MosChip MCS9901CV is a single-chip solution which offers excellent performance and high quality for robust business and demanding industrial applications."
“MosChip is proud to introduce a system solution package with such far-reaching application possibilities by providing a multitude of PCIe to Serial and Parallel I/O connectivity options,” commented Bhanu Nanduri, Chief Operating Officer for MosChip. “The MCS9901CV, together with its system design support package, addresses a wide range of business opportunities in chip-to-chip, and box-to-box connectivity applications with very short time to revenue schedules.”
EN-Genius Says…
Here’s a handy little interface device that should be of interest to anyone who’s starting to use PCIe in their embedded or industrial applications. While most of the PCIe products I’ve seen of late concentrate on port counts and interfaces to high-performance peripherals MosChip’s MCS9901CV’s mission is to bridge between the PCIe bus and the less-glamorous UARTs, serial and parallel interfaces, connections that so many embedded products still rely on. Its USB capabilities will also be a welcome addition as the slow-moving industrial computing sector is finally beginning to adopt this technology that’s now the interconnect of choice in the consumer market.
MosChip’s description in the release gives you a good feel for the chip’s capabilities, but I’d like to talk a little about the MCS9901CV's highly-configurable port structure. The controller gives you seven combinations of peripheral interfaces that can be invoked by using on-chip select pins. Its default configuration gives you four serial connections but tickling the select pins lets you drop two or more serial ports and replace them with six other combinations of parallel, ISA and USB ports. If none of those suit your application, you can add a small external EEPROM (or borrow a little memory space from one that’s already on your board) and have another 14 modes available to you.
 Having this ability to get nearly whatever mix of peripheral connections you need allows you to create a tight design without resorting to more costly custom ASICs or multiple chips. MosChip also pointed out that a single device can be configured to support multiple I/O card configurations, something that can cut down on inventory and logistics support costs.
Since many embedded and industrial applications involve time-critical real-time functions (often with processors that are not as fast or powerful as their consumer counterparts) MosChip’s designers were very smart to add features that lighten the processing load on the host CPU. For example, they equipped the MCS9901CV with DMA controllers that can handle simultaneous full-duplex transfers between all ports at full rate. This and the generous 256-byte FIFO buffering on each Tx and Rx channel help minimize the amount of time a processor must spend its limited resources on managing data transfers. The wide range of free software drivers that includes nearly all Windows and Macintosh OSs, Linux and DOS (imagine that!) is also a big plus in the many industries which may or may not be running the latest code from Redmond.
With most peripheral chip makers I’ve encountered focused so heavily on products for PCs, servers, and other high-end applications, most of MosChip's competition will come from the handful of Asian semiconductor manufacturers who focus on their domestic market and usually don’t tell me much about their activities. I would speculate, however, that some of the most significant competition will come from low-end FPGAs if the manufacturers can come up with workable PCIe interfaces. I’m not sure whether they will do this by adding an inexpensive external SerDes chip or if Xilinx and Altera will come up with PCIe-capable variants of their Spartan and Cyclone families. Lattice has something close with their ECPM2 series (see the November 2006 review) but even the smallest device is still 2x the cost of the MCS9901CV. In some applications this may be close enough because of the other functionality it absorbs.
It’s really nice to see a PCIe device that’s tailored to meet the needs of the industrial, embedded, and IPC markets. Although the PCI parallel bus still dominates most of the embedded and industrial sector, this should change fairly quickly as more and more chips, boards, and non-PC systems begin to transition to PCIe. I’d expect the MCS9901CV to find a home in many PCIe-to-serial, parallel and USB adapters, as well as serial attached devices, POS equipment and industrial PCs. MosChip is probably correct in its expectations that it will find wide acceptance as a controller in peripheral cards – especially in some slower-moving parts of the industrial sector where programmable logic controllers are considered state-of-the-art and serial interfaces are still the de facto standard. They even have several production-ready hardware reference designs for I/O cards available at no charge.
The MCS9901CV is in production. Design kits include a board support package, software drivers, EEPROM utilities and evaluation systems. Pricing starts at $9.95 in 10-k piece lots.
Product Page
|
|
|
|
|
