Controller Honed To Accelerate Shift From USB 1.1 To 2.0

Boasting of being the world's first USB 2.0 device controller, the NET2290 chip is said to rate high in design flexibility and in delivering system performance. With read/write cycle times of less than 15 ns--or over 1-Gb/s burst data rates--the Universal Serial Bus (USB) 2.0 chip is designed to minimize local CPU processing and software overhead while still achieving the maximum USB bandwidth. Targeted for CPU-based peripherals, the controller integrates on-chip an analog transceiver for USB 2.0, a direct interface to most 16/32-bit CPUs, seven endpoints, 8 KB of FIFO memory, a high-performance Serial Interface Engine (SIE), and highly integrated configuration logic. The NET2290's built-in dual-channel DMA interface and its automatic assignment of multiple-buffered FIFO are said to assure continuous high-speed USB performance.
The chip comes with a complete development kit, the NET2290PCI-RDK, whose PCI board allows engineers to easily emulate a USB 2.0 device without investing in software development tools or in-circuit emulators. And software developers can start their project in parallel with hardware designers to get a jump on time-to-market. The NET2290 chip comes in a 128-pin TQFP costing $15 each in initial volume quantities.