West Bridge Suits Media Devices

May 7, 2009

Cypress Semiconductor’s West Bridge Antioch chip is designed to sit between a media device CPU, a memory storage device, and a USB host device, providing simultaneous transfers between each connection (see the figure). This allows transf

William G. Wong

The chip is a tiny file server that employs the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP), which already is used on an array of mobile devices. The big difference is that the west bridge runs at High Speed USB speeds up to 480 Mbits/s using Cypress Semiconductor’s Turbo-MTP support. It allows synchronization with a PC while the media device is using data already on the storage device. The CPU and host PC do not access the directories or files on the storage device directly. This permits transfers of metadata and digital rights management (DRM) that aren’t always available with direct file access.

CYPRESS SEMICONDUCTORwww.cypress.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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