Driver tool speeds peripheral migration to USB

A PLX Technology Europe product story

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Apr 21, 2005

PLX's Remote PCI (RPCI) driver tool for Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP provides a simple interface enabling fast conversions of PCI drivers to USB.

PLX Technology will be showcasing a range of new USB 2.0 products and applications at next week's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle.

PLX is introducing at WinHEC its new PLX Remote PCI (RPCI) development tool, which, combined with PLX's recently introduced NET2282 PCI-to-USB bridge chip, simplifies the process of extending conventional PCI adapter designs into USB devices.

PLX's Remote PCI (RPCI) driver tool for Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP provides a simple interface enabling fast conversions of PCI drivers to USB.

RPCI applies directly to the NET2282, a PCI to Hi-Speed USB 2.0 peripheral bridge.

No new hardware is required for initial development.

By plugging an existing PCI adapter board into PLX's NET2282 stand alone rapid development kit (RDK) board and using the RPCI driver, developers can instantly start translating their PCI drivers for use in USB devices.

With RPCI, USB programming is not required.

The tool encapsulates the entire USB subsystem, including USB enumeration and hot plug and play, allowing driver developers to focus purely on PCI.

RPCI abstracts I/O, DMA and interrupt functions to be nearly identical to Microsoft's standard hardware abstraction layer (HAL).

"As many at WinHEC and elsewhere will attest, driver development has been a tremendous source of frustration when a design calls for adding USB to PCI-based boards", said Ryan Augustin, USB Software Manager at PLX.

"Developers have had to learn and thoroughly understand USB just to add the interface to an existing PCI design".

"Now, with the RPCI tool in the NET2282 RDK, they can essentially bypass that frustrating and time-consuming step, use a familiar interface to develop drivers, and bring the newly converted boards to market faster and with minimal additional hardware and software investment".

The NET2282 is the industry's first PCI-to-USB peripheral controller chip optimised for converting PCI-based designs to Hi-Speed USB 2.0 products.

The chip includes a mastering PCI interface and DMA controllers for initiating data transfers.

Integrated CPU and RAM allow the chip to emulate a PCI system's main CPU and memory.

The NET2282 includes PCI clock, reset, interrupt, and arbitration signals to substitute for the other components usually found in a typical PCI host environment.

The built in Hi-Speed USB transceiver allows for sustained data transfers up to 40Mbyte/s, roughly the performance of PCI.

The NET2282 is designed for a wide range of industrial and consumer applications, such as networking, printing, video capture, and TV-tuner products.

In addition to the RPCI tool, the NET2282 RDK comes complete with a board containing a PCI slot for plugging PCI boards into the RDK board.

Peripheral-side firmware is included to easily configure the NET2282 to emulate a standard USB-class device (such as a printer or video device) for which no USB host drivers need to be written.

For custom applications, firmware APIs are provided to abstract the USB transactions to reads and writes.

While this device-side firmware is available for various operating systems, it is written in standard C language, with portability in mind.

A porting guide is included with the RDK.

The RPCI development tool is sampling now and in May will be included at no extra charge in the NET2282 RDK.

The NET2282 controller chip ($7.80 in 10,000 annual quantities) and the NET2282 RDK ($695) are available now.