Devices ensure data-line speed and integrity

An ON Semiconductor product story

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Apr 8, 2003

ON Semiconductor has five new MicroIntegration circuits designed to protect sensitive components in portable and computing applications from damaging and disruptive electrical transients.

ON Semiconductor has five new MicroIntegration circuits designed to protect sensitive components in portable and computing applications from damaging and disruptive electrical transients during the transmission of high-speed data.

Target applications for the new devices include digital cameras and other portable consumer equipment, set-top boxes and high-speed data ports in PCs including Digital Visual Interface (DVI), VGA, Ethernet, and Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports.

The company plans to put seven additional integrated filter and line-protection devices into full production in the second quarter.

Four of the new devices are filters designed specifically for USB, Ethernet, Firewire and other high-speed data applications.

These devices meet all the requirements of USB including electromagnetic interference (EMI) filtering and line termination for upstream/downstream ports.

Each of these new integrated components replaces a current discrete solution that requires 12 components.

As such, these devices are ideal for board designs where space is at premium - most notably portable applications.

The additional eight new devices offer the industry's lowest capacitance for electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection.

Each of these new protection devices has been tested at 15kV contact discharge - which exceeds the IEC61000 8kV ESD standard.

With an industry-low capacitance of 1.5pF typical, the devices ensure that data-line speeds are maintained and guarantee the integrity of the data.

"ON Semiconductor designed these protection devices to meet the strict specification of advanced computing architectures with capacitance specifications low enough to meet the 480Mbyte/s signal integrity requirements for USB 2.0", said Ramesh Ramchandani, ON Semiconductor Vice President and General Manager of Integrated Power Products.

"Because these small integrated devices utilise less board space than discrete solutions, they simplify board designs, reduce the number of components required to effectively protect data-line communications components and ultimately provide an overall system cost savings".