Another Industry-First UART – Reaffirms Company's Continuing Focus on Technology Innovation

Fremont, Calif.— Exar Corp., a leading provider of high-performance, mixed-signal silicon solutions for the worldwide communications infrastructure, today announced the industry's first dual-channel 66MHz PCI 3.0 compliant Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART) device. The XR17V252 offers a seamless upgrade path for product transitions from 33MHz to 66MHz. In addition, the product includes fractional baud rate generation, and offers PCI power management support. The device supports the rapid market transition to higher speed interconnects found in emerging opportunities from the computer and telecom server markets for applications such as remote access servers, storage, instrumentation, serial port expansion, embedded systems, factory automation and process control.

"With this device, Exar's marks its fourth industry-first UART offering in the last 11 months and again demonstrates its commitment to product and technology innovation," said Levent Ozcolak, division vice president and general manager, Interface Products Division. "Exar has one of the most extensive, and versatile portfolios of world-class serial communications solutions. Offering 8-bit and 32-bit options, a wide range of packages (some extremely small) and FIFO choices of 16, 32, 64 and 128, Exar continues to provide superior value to its customers for current and next generation opportunities."

Four Industry Firsts
Announced in December 2005, the Company introduced the industry's first 1.8 Volt single-channel UART (16L570) in 24 and 32-pin QFN packages; in June 2005 Exar added the industry's smallest UART (XR16L580), and in March 2005 introduced the industry's first multi-channel 66MHz PCI 3.0 compliant UART family with the eight-channel UART (XR17V258).

"Added to the already market-accepted eight channel 66MHz PCI 3.0 compliant device (XR17V258), the new dual-channel IC offers customers a smaller package option (100-pin TQFP ) for more space constrained design environments," said Eric Nguyen, senior strategic marketing manager, Interface Products Division. "The XR17V25x series supports both the increasing demand for higher bandwidth, plus faster data transmission speeds. This, coupled with a direct interface to the PCI bus, can eliminate the PCI-Local bus bridge saving additional board space and reducing system cost."

Product Details
Next in the XR17V25x series of single chip multi-channel 66MHz PCI 3.0 compliant ICs, the two-channel XR17V252 device features a 3.3V supply, fractional baud fate generator, PCI Bus Power Management 1.1 support, 16-bit programmable timer/counter, and 32-bit of data loading and unloading. Support for 66MHz PCI is ideal for system management and administration of applications where continuous redundancy and Quality of Service at higher bus clock speeds are critical.

Each UART channel includes a fully programmable TX and RX FIFO level trigger, FIFO level counter, an automatic hardware and software flow control, wireless infrared (IrDA) encoder/decoder, and an automatic RS-485 half-duplex direction control output for hardware and software design simplification. The XR17V252 consists of two independent UART channels with 64 bytes of Transmit (TX) and Receive (RX) FIFOs and a global interrupt source register for faster interrupt parsing of all the channels within the device. Its fifth generation configuration registers, and enhanced registers, meet the high bandwidth and power management requirements of communication systems. The XR17V252 also offers sleep mode with wake-up indicator feature that allows for lower power consumption. It is register-set, package and pin compatible with Exar's existing 33MHz XR17C152 (5V) and XR17D152 (Universal) PCI UART devices.

Tools and Support
The XR17V252 is supported by Exar's market proven PCI software drivers for popular operating systems including Windows 2000, XP and Linux. With the availability of software drivers and Exar's application support line, PCI UART customers can accelerate their time to market by eliminating driver development, testing and diagnostic procedures.