Ik lees bij TechWeb dat Philips als eerste fabrikant is begonnen met de sampling van haar USB 2.0 controller chip. Aan de andere kant zou Cypress Semiconductor Corp de eerste zijn geweest die de werking demonstreerde van haar prototype EZ-USB FX2 USB 2.0 controller, die inderdaad 40 keer sneller bleek te functioneren dan de USB 1.1 standaard. Lucent meldde ergens deze herfst klaar te zijn met haar controller chip:
Starting Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum here Cypress, Philips, Lucent and others plan to flex their USB 2.0 musclesby demonstrating new controllers and transceiver chips for PC-to-peripheral interfaces running 40 times faster than the existing USB 1.1 standard.
Philips Semiconductors of the Netherlands claims to be the first company to begin sampling a USB 2.0 controller chip. Cypress Semiconductor Corp. said its EZ-USB FX2 chip was the first integrated peripheral controller for USB 2.0 to demonstrate full functionality in Intel Corp.'s labs. Lucent Technologies Inc. this week also announced a single-chip host controller and a transceiver for USB 2.0, promising samples of those 0.25-micron ICs by this fall.
The USB 2.0 specification cranks up the data-transfer rates of the Universal Serial Bus to 480 megabits per second vs. 12-Mbits/sec. for the USB 1.1 standard.Those higher speeds are needed to deal with larger data files, such as graphics and images as well as high-speed mass storage peripherals, Internet access appliances, local area networks, and wireless LANs.
[...] At stake is a big market opportunity that spans personal computer systems, PC peripherals, consumer products (such as digital cameras), and Internet devices. Cypress claims it is the current leader in USB chip shipments with 70 million units delivered to the market. The San Jose company projected that its 1999 revenues from the USB products will grow by more than 200% to $100 million in 2000.
Cypress said its EZ-USB FX2 USB 2.0 solution integrates a transceiver, a serial interface engine (SIE), and a general programmable interface (GPIF). Cypress claims its one-chip solution can be easier to use in implementing USB 2.0 than programmable logic or ASICs because more functions are integrated on silicon, including an 8051 microcontroller, logic, memory, and phase-locked loops.
Wij danken Daantjoh voor de link!