Low-voltage UARTs have four fast channels

An Exar product story

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Jun 11, 2008

Six devices share a common set of features including four independent UART channels, selectable Tx and Rx trigger levels and datarates up to 16Mbit/s.

A new family of quad-channel UARTs from Exar combines high performance (up to 16Mbit/s) with low-voltage (1.62V) operation.

The XR16MXX4 series is suitable for a variety of battery operated portable consumer products as well as industrial applications including point-of-sales equipment, servers, industrial automation, public parking systems and ticketing machines.

"At 1.62V, and in three FIFO levels (16, 32 and 64byte), designers of advanced low voltage and low power boards can immediately use our new series, and differentiate their OEM products", said Eric Nguyen, Strategic Marketing Director, Interface Product Line.

"Exar is continuing to expand its UART product portfolio; this new family of quad-channel UARTs offers a unique lower voltage and high performance option while maintaining full software and pin compatibility with our previous 3.3/5V quad-channel UART family of products".

"Our datarate is up to 8x faster than our nearest competition providing our customers clear advantages for the growing market demand for faster data delivery at lower voltages".

Comprising six devices, the XR16MXX4 series includes the XR16M554/554D, XR16M564/564D and XR16M654/654D.

All the devices share a common set of features including four independent UART channels, selectable Tx and Rx trigger levels and datarates up to 16Mbit/s.

In addition, the XR16M564/564D and XR16M654/654D have automatic sleep mode, automatic hardware flow control, automatic software flow control, a wireless infra-red encoder/decoder and a fractional baud rate generator.

The series supports both the Intel and Motorola bus interfaces.

All devices in the series are supported by standard serial port software drivers for popular operating systems including Windows CE 4.2 and 5.0, Windows 2000, XP and Linux.

With the availability of software drivers and Exar's application support hot line, UART customers can greatly accelerate their product development cycle.

All six devices are available now, and operate over the industrial temperature range.