Bridge chips support mobile system design

Elan Digital Systems has launched two bridge chips - the USBHC869 and VUB300 - designed to support tablet smartphones and other mobile system designs.

The USBHC869 measures 0.16 x 0.16in (4 x 4mm) and is claimed to be the world's smallest system bus to USB host controller bridge providing an additional USB 1.1 host controller for virtually any high-performance low-power system via the system bus.

The VUB300 is a USB2.0 to SD/SDIO host bridge chip.

This device provides a single SD+SDIO host port from a USB host port.

The combination of VUB300 chip and Elan drivers allows the device to appear in the system as an SD/SDIO host controller.

A benefit for system designers is that SDIO client devices do not need new USB drivers.

Applications for the USBHC869 device include: multi-radio GSM/3G support, as well as Bluetooth and multi-function peripheral devices/modules.

The device has a footprint of 0.16 x 0.16 x 0.037in (4 x 4 x 0.9mm) in a 36-pin LGA package, and features: a 4uA standby and 20mA active; 3.3, 2.8 or 1.3V I/O, programmable PLL for flexible xtal or external clock frequency; integrated USB transceivers; 16-bit uP bus interface; and DDK support for Linux and Windows, as well as other operating systems.

Applications for the VUB300 include adding SDIO-based WLAN, Bluetooth, GPS and multi-function devices to virtually any system via a standard USB host port.

It comes in a 6 x 6mm QFN package and supports any SD/SDIO specification compliant devices.

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