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connectivityZONE Products for the week of April 21, 2008
Pericom Semiconductor Says…
One Chip PCIe to UART Serial-Bridge Family
SBridge product family offers complete one chip cost effective design solution for expanding UART market requirements
Pericom Semiconductor Corporation has announced the addition of a new industry first PCI Express SBridge (serial bridge) product family offering a complete one chip cost effective solution for the expanding CPU to UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter) I/O market. Moxa is the first customer to incorporate Pericom’s new UART offering.
The new product family integrates a complete PCI Express interface bridge with a fully featured multi port, multi protocol UART controller, and is targeted to volume industrial and building control, point of sale, instrumentation, PDA, and GPS system I/O applications. “The UART controller market TAM is expected to grow to over 60 million ports by the end of 2008,” according to Jag Bolaria, senior analyst at semiconductor market research firm The Linley Group. “Pericom is well positioned to capitalize on this growth with leading edge single chip solutions required by next generation embedded control systems.”
“Pericom’s one chip UART solutions give MOXA the performance, flexibility, footprint, and cost savings we require to deliver the most competitive industrial and commercial platforms to our customers,” said Sureen Lee, director of HA Strategic Business Unit for Moxa, Inc., a global company that designs and manufactures device networking products for industrial automation.
“Pericom is pleased to add these three new advanced performance SBridge products to our industry leading variety of PCI Express product functions,” said Bill Weir, Pericom’s senior marketing director for Connect Products. “UART market growth is fueled by accelerated adoption of embedded UART I/O in building control systems for HVAC, environmental, emergency, and communications control to host CPU applications. We have completed our beta testing and now have design wins with Tier 1 embedded controller providers, such as Moxa.”
Key Features and Benefits:
The Pericom SBridge PCIe to UART family consists of three different UART port count configurations: 2 ports (PI7C9X7952), 4 ports (PI7C9X7954), and 8 ports (PI7C9X7958). The product family is specifically designed for low power consumption and small package size, optimized PCB layout, fully meets the requirements of the latest PCI-SIG PCIe 1.1 and PCI 1.2 specifications, and is listed on the PCISIG certification list. Unique features include:
- Complete one chip PCIe to high performance UART solution
- High performance 16C950 (RS-232) UART ports
- Backward compatible to 16C550/650/750/850 software
- Supports Baud rates to 62.5Mb/sec (sync mode)Mbits/s
- RoHS compliant and small footprint packages (PQFP and BGA)
- Customer programmable EEPROM port for ultimate flexibility
- Software drivers for major OS – Windows, Linux
In addition to displaying its new SBridge product family at IDF Shanghai, Pericom will present live demonstrations of its new PCI Express to HDMI/DisplayPort switch, a Pericom PCIe enabled video surveillance system, and display various PCIe applications cards. The demonstrations and cards utilize Pericom’s PCIe Packet Switch, Bridge, ReDriver, Signal Switch, and Timing products.
EN-Genius Says…
UARTS are like cockroaches: they are long-lived, rugged, and will probably be here long after we’re gone. Despite the encroachment of Ethernet, CAN Bus, ZigBee, and more modern networking technologies into commercial and industrial applications, the low cost and robust characteristics of RS-232-type serial interfaces allow them to still enjoy great popularity in both legacy and new systems. In fact, Pericom says that the use of UART-based serial interfaces in industrial control applications like HVAC, alarms, elevators, low-speed video surveillance, and other building controls have doubled in the last couple of years, not to mention their continuing popularity in most hard-wired PoS systems. That’s why Pericom’s new series of multi-port UARTs with native PCI Express support is such a smart move.
Providing 4, 6, or 8 ports worth of asynchronous serial communication that plugs directly into a PCIe connection, these devices provide an inexpensive bridge to modern computing systems. It’s much cheaper and more compact than the multi-chip solutions you’ve had to cobble together from a standard UART and a PCIe bridge until now. Power consumption varies with port count from 600 mW for the 2-channel PI7C9X7952 to 900 mW for the 8-channel PI7C9X7958.
 While I don’t think that PCI busses (not to mention VME) will disappear from the embedded computing space any time soon (give or take a decade), PCIe board space savings and the growing availability of new I/O products supporting the PCIe standard mean that growing numbers of applications will be adopting the new standard. Having a low-cost way to plug a new box into legacy peripherals will make upgrades quicker and easier for both manufacturers and their customers. Pericom has made it even easier with a full set of APIs, an evaluation kit, and everything else you’ll need to get these babies up and running on your software quickly.
While I often quibble with manufacturer claims of having an Industry First, I think Pericom is well justified in asserting it for these parts. Nobody else would be crazy enough to marry a 1960 vintage communication technology with a 21st-century bus – or as smart.
Samples, an evaluation board and OS driver development kits are available now, with production quantities available in May, 2008. Pricing in 10-k piece lots is:
- PI7C9X7952 - $5.30
- PI7C9X7954 - $6.80
- PI7C9X7958 - $9.50
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