Cypress Semiconductor Corp. announced a small package option for its EZ-USB® HX3™ USB 3.0 hub controller. The 6 mm x 6 mm ball grid array (BGA) package saves board space for Ultrabook™ devices, tablets, portable port replicators, and other mobile and consumer devices, adding to the HX3 controller’s best-in-class feature set that includes robust interoperability, extensive charging support and full configurability.
The versatile EZ-USB HX3 USB 3.0 hub controller offers full configurability via I2C EEPROM, I2C Slave and GPIO options, allowing designers to configure PHY drive strength, the number of downstream ports, power switch polarity, LED indicators and more. HX3 offers a Ghost Charging feature for charging of devices without a host, and it also supports the USB-IF Battery Charging v1.2 specification and charging of Apple devices. HX3 is the first SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0) hub controller to offer an Accessory Charger Adaptor Dock (ACA-Dock) feature, which enables upstream charging for portable devices with a USB On-The-Go (OTG) host. The controller’s Shared Link feature enables up to eight downstream ports, allowing products such as docking stations and desktop monitors to connect with more USB peripherals using a single four port hub. HX3 is highly interoperable and has been thoroughly tested against over 400 USB peripherals, including popular consumer electronics, PC peripherals, HDDs and SSDs, and legacy devices.
“The widely available USB 3.0 ports in personal computers are now beginning to show up on mobile devices such as tablets and smart phones,” said Mark Fu, Senior Director of the USB 3.0 Business Unit at Cypress. “Product designers want USB 3.0 port expansion solutions that are smaller and more power-efficient to achieve further miniaturization and lower power consumption for their mobile designs. Our HX3 controller’s space-saving 6 mm x 6 mm package helps product designers achieve this goal, providing design flexibility, low power and top performance in a tiny package. We are working on an even smaller 10-mm2 chip-scale package option that will further drive down the HX3 solution footprint by another 70%.”
The EZ-USB HX3 hub controller’s on-chip USB 2.0 and SuperSpeed PHYs are each configurable, which helps to preserve signal integrity when driving long PCB traces. Its High-speed slope, Transmit Amplitude, and De-emphasis parameters are adjustable from a Graphical User Interface on a PC. HX3 consumes only 40 mW in standby mode and 735 mW with all ports in operation at SuperSpeed data rates—50% less than competing solutions.
More information on HX3 is available at www.cypress.com/hx3.
Filed Under: M2M (machine to machine)
