How Advanced USB Standards Address Power, Area, and Performance
Today’s IP choices for the Universal Serial Bus (USB) cover many different types of interfaces for a wide variety of applications�including portable consumer products. Power consumption and small form factors are key issues. SoC designers must also consider new requirements imposed by smaller technology nodes, especially for the USB PHY. As the most successful connectivity standard in history, USB has expanded from connecting PCs and PC peripherals to flash storage, digital imaging, audio and video, wireless, automotive, and now to tremendous growth in mobile phones. A force behind this growth are the ongoing enhancements to the USB standard, including the PictBridge specification that supports direct connections between printers and digital cameras and most recently, the High Speed Inter-Chip (HSIC) and Link Power Management (LPM) standards that lower power, area and enable chip-to-chip connectivity with USB. We will also begin to see the emergence of the USB 3.0 standard, which can deliver over 10 times the speed of today’s USB 2.0 connection.
Issues such as power consumption and small form factors in consumer products drive many of the key USB challenges for the design community today. The recent USB High Speed Inter-Chip (HSIC) standard makes it easier to interconnect other functionality that has been partitioned into multiple chips. USB HSIC offers an easy way to connect many different types of functions in a system. Since USB is already used extensively to connect products using the traditional USB cable, it is a good choice to move inside the system and act as a high speed chip to chip interface. For example, USB HSIC can be used to connect an embedded webcam, GPS, or Wifi chip to an applications processor within a smart phone or small form- factor embedded PC. Significant time and cost is saved because USB drivers and firmware that work with traditional USB 2.0 systems can be reused in USB HSIC applications...
Gervais Fong is a Senior Product Manager for Mixed-Signal PHY IP at Synopsys. He has over 15 years of experience holding product marketing and product management positions covering ASIC, FPGA, EDA, and IP products. Gervais holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. For more information on DesignWare USB IP, visit www.synopsys.com/usb
Ecnmag.com - September 09, 2008 Using PCI-Express platform circuitry, LeCroy’s Voyager protocol analyzer exerciser system tests devices, systems and software under the USB 3.0 (SuperSpeed USB) standard. The device provides simultaneous protocol capture of both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 signaling, and uses the de facto standard CATC Trace display to illustrate USB 3.0 protocol. The analyzer will target fast sync-and-go transfer applications in the PC, consumer and mobile segments that are necessary as digital media become ubiquitous. Advanced triggering, hardware filtering, and Spec View are included. LeCroy Corporation Soon the world will move 10 times faster. The movement of the data among digital devices will accelerate incredibly. Soon the world will witness and experience the super power of the all new Universal Serial Bus version named USB 3.0. This specification is still in its prototype stage, but it will hit the consumer market soon. The specifications of the USB 3.0 have already been decided and developed. USB 3.0 is aiming at a bandwidth which is 10 times faster than the current USB, i.e. USB 2.0. This new version has lots of awesome improvements. It will allow users to transmit data at a rate of 5Gbps. That means a PC user will now be able to transfer a whole DVD quality full length movie within seconds. Wouldn’t that be nice? It will totally change the way the world communicates, or in other words, the way various peripheral devices talk to each other. Apart from the speed, one other major improvement in this new version is that it simultaneously supports two way communications (full duplex transfers). This means that the devices connected via USB 3.0 will be able to send, as well as receive, signals at the same time. This is in contrast to the USB 2.0 devices, like the Super Talent Pico, which can only transmit one signal at a time. It is believed that the new USB standard will also lead to better CPU usage and will be backward compatible with USB 2.0/USB 1.0 too.
800-453-2769, www.lecroy.comUSB 3.0: Get ready to welcome the future
By Alexis • Sep 17th, 2008 • Category: Features, Lead Story, Mobile Computing Accessory News, USB
Posts
