Octal UARTs speed to 15Mbit/s

Novel features include a patented global interrupt status register, fractional baud rate generator and automatic hardware or software flow control.

Exar has released two highly integrated high-performance low-voltage low-power eight-channel UARTs - the XR16M598 (16byte FIFO) and XR16M698 (32byte FIFO).

The XR16M598/M698 series includes an array of advanced features, and is ideal for a wide variety of products such as next generation portable consumer devices, point-of-sale systems, servers, industrial automation, ticketing machines and public parking systems.

"This high performance (15Mbit/s), low voltage (1.62V) octal UART series has a wide variety of features including a patented global interrupt status register, fractional baud rate generator and automatic hardware or software flow control", said Eric Nguyen, Strategic Marketing Director, Interface Product Line.

"These, plus other innovative product elements such as programmable TX/RX trigger levels, automatic RS485 half-duplex direction control and infra-red mode (IrDA 1.0) enable system architects to optimise their designs and accelerate their time to market".

"In addition, there is an easy migration path as the series is software and pin compatible with the 3.3V XR16V598/V698/V798 and 5V XR16L788".

The XR16M598/698 has a patented approach for global interrupt status registers that uses four registers.

The first register identifies the interrupting UART channels.

The three remaining registers use Exar's patented 3bit status encoding which specifies the highest priority interrupt for each channel, thus enabling the software to quickly identify and service any pending interrupts.

Additionally, system architects can take advantage of the fifth generation (5G) flat register set that simplifies software initialisation during the initial design phase.

Traditional UARTs require one chip select and one interrupt line per channel.

The XR16M598/M698 series requires only one chip select and one interrupt line per device thus greatly simplifying the hardware design.

In addition, the integrated fractional baud rate generator (FBRG) gives the hardware designer the flexibility to use a clock source that may already be used by other board components to generate the desired baud rates.

This FBRG eliminates the need for an extra crystal or external clock source.

Exar has one of the broadest portfolios of high-performance interface solutions including UARTs, serial transceivers - RS232, RS485 and multiprotocol - as well as integrated UART/transceiver combinations and recently introduced wireless chipset.

For chip-to-chip or system-to-system connections, Exar's single- and multichannel interface ICs provides immediate competitive advantages to designers: low voltage/power, reduction in board space requirements, increased bandwidth capacity, and enhanced product features.

Interface devices are found practically everywhere including point-of-sale (POS) terminals, digital televisions, industrial automation equipment, handheld devices, and networking environments.

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 hotline, UART customers can greatly accelerate their product development cycle.

Samples of the XR16M598 and XR16M698 are available now.

Both devices are in 100-pin QFP packages and operate over the industrial temperature range.

In 1000-unit quantities both the XR16M598, and the XR16M698 are in the mid-$13 range.

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