Evaluation board offers fast track to FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 drives

The latest IDE bridge board from Oxford Semiconductor provides 'plug and go' evaluation of the OXUF922 bridge chip in FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b) and USB 2.0 hard disk drive applications.

By connecting the EV-OXUF922-1394B-800 evaluation board into an ATA/ATAPI drive via a standard IDE cable and applying power, users can instantly create a high speed FireWire 800 or USB 2.0 drive.

At the heart of this compact reference design, a new BGA packaged version of the ARM7 backed OXUF922 bridge chip handles 800Mbps FireWire 800, 480Mbps USB 2.0 and 133MHz, 80MBps IDE connections. Device firmware is a second generation version of that used in the industry leading OXFW911 bridge chip.

In non-storage applications, the OXUF922's IDE controller can also be configured as a high performance DMA interface, while an integrated 12Mbps UART provides an additional direct data communication interface.