Single chip solution for 15Mbps serial connectivity from 3.3V PCI or Cardbus

New from Oxford Semiconductor, the OXCB950 is a 3.3V device that provides a single, high speed serial channel from either Cardbus or PCI. Designed for use in embedded processing applications and serial add-in cards, it offers memory or I/O mapped access to the fastest available PC-compatible UART and provides data rates up to 15Mbps in asynchronous mode and128-deep transmitter and receiver FIFOs. The deep FIFOs reduce CPU overhead and facilitate high data rates. Infra-red operation is also supported. The integrated UART is software compatible with industry standard 16C550 devices and the Oxford Semiconductor OX16C95x family of high performance UARTs. The OXCB950 is compliant to PC Card Standard 7.0 and PCI Bus Specification 2.2. It has function access to allow engineers to pre-configure the UART prior to handover to generic device drivers and features a flexible clock prescaler from 1 to 31.875.

Two multi-purpose I/O pins can be configured as interrupt input or 'wake-up' pins and the device can also be reconfigured using optional Microwire-based, non-volatile configuration memory (EEPROM).

The OXCB950 is housed in a 100-pin TQFP package. Samples are available now and the price from distributors in 1000+ quantities is $6.42 each.