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connectivityZONE Products for the week of February 18, 2008
Cypress Semiconductor Says…
West Bridge Controller Delivers Market’s Fastest Sideloading For PMPs, PNDs, Wireless Cards, And Other Embedded Applications
Flexible Astoria Multimedia Mass Storage Controller with MLC NAND Flash Support Opens up Family Connectivity Performance beyond Handsets
Cypress Semiconductor Corp. has introduced a new West Bridge peripheral controller with Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND Flash support that enables designers to use lowest-cost, highest-density flash storage. The West Bridge Astoria controller supports up to 16 MLC NAND Flash devices, which cost approximately three times less than Single-Level Cell (SLC) NAND Flash devices for the same storage density.
The new controller delivers the same industry-leading, High-Speed USB data transfer performance as the West Bridge Antioch controller, and adds a configurable multimedia storage interface and flexible processor interface, easing connections to a broad range of embedded processors and mass storage devices. These new features allows the Astoria controller to connect to any embedded processor or DSP, bringing MLC NAND support to new applications including portable media players (PMPs), wireless cards, dongles, portable navigation devices (PNDs), digital cameras, POS terminals and more.
By fully offloading management of USB and storage from an embedded processor, the West Bridge Astoria peripheral controller saves critical processor resources and maximizes data-transfer performance. The controller marks the debut of Cypress’s fast-interleaving N-Xpress MLC NAND Flash control technology, with static wear-leveling, bad block management and 4-bit ECC (Error Correction Coding) to support up to 16 SLC/MLC NAND devices. The storage port can be configured so designers can select up to two SDIO devices such as Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, and SD cards, making Astoria ideal for applications such as data cards and dongles. Astoria also supports other types of storage from a list that includes Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) v. 2.0, MultiMedia Card+ (MMC+) v. 4.2 cards, CE-ATA for HDD, as well as various types of controlled NAND. The flexible processor interface enables connection to most embedded processors adding a selection of Asynchronous SRAM, ADMUX (Address Data Multiplexing), SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) and NAND interfaces to the Pseudo-CRAM interface of Antioch.
“Cypress’s West Bridge Antioch controller has enjoyed success by delivering the fastest sideloading between a handset and a PC, allowing users to download 1 GB of storage in less than a minute,” said Alakesh Chetia, vice president of Cypress’s West Bridge Business Unit. “Our new Astoria controller delivers this data-transfer performance to a variety of processor and storage types using flexible processor interfaces, configurable storage interfaces, and our N-Xpress MLC NAND controller technology, expanding the West Bridge concept to multiple embedded applications.”
"MLC NAND Flash is growing rapidly in popularity due to its higher densities and ever-expanding cost differential over SLC NAND," said Nam Hyung Kim, director and chief analyst, Memory ICs and Storage Systems at the market research firm iSuppli Corp., El Segundo, Calif. "With the steady increase in demand for higher density storage in all embedded applications, system support for MLC NAND will become a necessity."
The West Bridge Astoria controller features up to 27 programmable GPIOs and 16 USB endpoints. It comes in a small 100-ball VFBGA (Very Fine Ball Grid Array) package that measures only 6 mm x 6 mm and 0.5-mm pitch. Additionally, Astoria supports standard handset frequencies such as 19.2 MHz and 26 MHz for clock input, removing the need for an additional crystal.
About the West Bridge Family
Devices in the new West Bridge family of peripheral controllers function as a companion chip to an embedded central processing unit (CPU) to free it from data-intensive operations. In the same way the North Bridge and South Bridge were introduced in the PC architecture to enable the main CPU to evolve independently from quickly changing memory and peripheral interfaces, embedded systems are evolving towards a similar architecture, where a West Bridge device manages the interfaces and offloads from the main CPU specific peripheral-to-peripheral traffic.
The West Bridge family is based on Cypress’s Simultaneous Link to Independent Multimedia (SLIM) architecture, which manages multiple, dedicated paths between peripherals, memory and the processor to allow maximum data throughput. In addition to providing a path to interfaces not supported by the main processor, the SLIM architecture allow direct and independent data transfer from one interface to another, offloading the main CPU, and freeing up its resources for higher system performance.
EN-Genius Says…
Embedded systems designers rejoice! Thanks to Cypress' new family of peripheral controllers you’ll soon be able to enjoy the same kind of the flexibility in memory and I/O choices that the folks who work with PCs and servers have had for years. Besides reducing the processing power your microcontroller (or DSP) has to expend managing peripherals and memory operations, Cypress’ so-called West Bridge products should also allow you to easily expand or switch I/O and memory devices with a minimum of fuss. Their new series of Astoria controllers has been designed specifically for mobile devices, with support for nearly any kind of memory you’re likely to use, and a direct, fast path from a PC to the handheld’s mass storage that allows consumers to download their tunes, pix, or vids in a jiffy.
The Astoria architecture builds on Cypress’s earlier Antioch series of SRAM memory controllers (released in late 2007), adding support for lower-cost MLC NAND Flash, USB capabilities and a few other goodies we’ll discuss shortly. Astoria’s eight chip enable lines can support up to 16 MLC chips, or 16 G using today’s biggest devices (1Gx 16 bits). Its MLC NAND Flash support capabilities include the ECC processing, bad block management, and wear leveling functions that would otherwise require extra logic or unnecessarily burden a host processor. According to Cypress, this alone can pay for the cost of the chip by eliminating up to $9 in BOM costs.
 Besides its memory capabilities, Astoria offers a direct path from PC to nearly any mass storage device (such as SD, MMC, HDD or NAND) using a High-Speed USB interface. This is accomplished using a combination of multiplexers and traffic arbitration algorithms (implemented in hardware logic in the data plane and an embedded 8051 in the control plane) that allows streams from both its mass storage and USB interfaces to connect with your host CPU simultaneously without any blocking or requiring any intervention. Bypassing the host CPU results in much faster data transfers, typically 5-30x faster than if the processor was in the way. This dramatically-increased transfer speed means that the consumer using your product will have to wait only few seconds rather than a few minutes to synch their data files, download songs, or exchange photos.
Since processors usually take much longer to evolve than the devices they connect to, it’s very handy to have a technology shim like the Astoria controller that will let a mature embedded system platform take advantage of the price/performance bump cycles that memory and I/O products regularly experience. The smart combination of unique features offered by the Astoria and Cypress other West Bridge products indicates that they’ve borrowed a key idea from their competitor (IDT) play book to move their I/O product lines away from generic, me-too items that compete on price alone. Instead, they’ve used their deep knowledge of cell phone-related interfaces, multi-port and USB technologies, to create application-specific products that solve tough design problems while grabbing a larger chunk of the overall BOM.
The West Bridge Astoria peripheral controller is currently sampling and is expected to be in production in the first half of 2008. Pricing will be under $5 in 500-k piece lots.
Data Sheet
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