Cypress Introduces Industry’s Smallest USB 3.0 Hub Controller

SAN JOSE, Calif., December 17, 2014 – Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (NASDAQ: CY) today announced a small package option for its EZ-USB^® HX3™ USB 3.0 hub controller. The 6 mm x 6 mm ball grid array (BGA) package saves board space for Ultrabook™ devices, tablets, portable port replicators, and other mobile and consumer devices, adding to the HX3 controller’s best-in-class feature set that includes robust interoperability, extensive charging support and full configurability.

The versatile EZ-USB HX3 USB 3.0 hub controller offers full configurability via I²C EEPROM, I²C Slave and GPIO options, allowing designers to configure PHY drive strength, the number of downstream ports, power switch polarity, LED indicators and more. HX3 offers a Ghost Charging feature for charging of devices without a host, and it also supports the USB-IF Battery Charging v1.2 specification and charging of Apple devices. HX3 is the first SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0) hub controller to offer an Accessory Charger Adaptor Dock (ACA-Dock) feature, which enables upstream charging for portable devices with a USB On-The-Go (OTG) host. The controller’s Shared Link feature enables up to eight downstream ports, allowing products such as docking stations and desktop monitors to connect with more USB peripherals using a single four port hub. HX3 is highly interoperable and has been thoroughly tested against over 400 USB peripherals, including popular consumer electronics, PC peripherals, HDDs and SSDs, and legacy devices.

“The widely available USB 3.0 ports in personal computers are now beginning to show up on mobile devices such as tablets and smart phones,” said Mark Fu, Senior Director of the USB 3.0 Business Unit at Cypress. “Product designers want USB 3.0 port expansion solutions that are smaller and more power-efficient to achieve further miniaturization and lower power consumption for their mobile designs. Our HX3 controller’s space-saving 6 mm x 6 mm package helps product designers achieve this goal, providing design flexibility, low power and top performance in a tiny package. We are working on an even smaller 10-mm² chip-scale package option that will further drive down the HX3 solution footprint by another 70%.”

The EZ-USB HX3 hub controller’s on-chip USB 2.0 and SuperSpeed PHYs are each configurable, which helps to preserve signal integrity when driving long PCB traces. Its High-speed slope, Transmit Amplitude, and De-emphasis parameters are adjustable from a Graphical User Interface on a PC. HX3 consumes only 40 mW in standby mode and 735 mW with all ports in operation at SuperSpeed data rates—50% less than competing solutions.

Product Availability

Cypress is now sampling three versions of the EZ-USB HX3 USB 3.0 hub controller in the new BGA package: the CYUSB3328 4-port hub with Shared Link and GPIO interface, the CYUSB3314 4-port hub with individual port power control, and the CYUSB3304 4-port hub with ganged port power control. More information on HX3 is available at www.cypress.com/hx3.

Three EZ-USB HX3 Development Kits are available for customer evaluation: the full-featured CY4613 with the CYUSB3328 controller, the versatile CY4603 with the CYUSB3314 controller, and the low-BOM CY4609 with the CYUSB3304 controller. These kits integrate the required external components and come with the Blaster Plus software utility for Windows, which is used to change the configuration parameters of the HX3.

About Cypress EZ-USB SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0) Portfolio

Cypress’s SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0) portfolio began with EZ-USB FX3™, the industry’s only programmable SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0) peripheral controller. The portfolio now includes the EZ-USB CX3™ camera controller, the EZ-USB FX3S™ RAID-on-Chip controller, the EZ-USB SD3 storage controller, and the EZ-USB HX3 hub controller.

EZ-USB FX3 provides SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0) connectivity in virtually any system. It is equipped with a highly configurable General Programmable Interface (GPIF™ II), which can be programmed in 8-, 16- and 32-bit configurations with data rates as high as 400 megabytes per second. GPIF II enables FX3 to interface directly to nearly any processor, ASIC or FPGA. The on-chip ARM9 CPU core with 512 KB RAM delivers 200 MIPS of computational power and is available for applications that require local data processing.

The EZ-USB CX3 programmable camera controller enables developers to add SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0) connectivity to any image sensors supporting the Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI) Camera Serial Interface Type 2 (CSI-2) standard. The EZ-USB FX3S storage controller supports dual Secure Digital (SD) or embedded MultiMedia Card (eMMC) interfaces. Based on Cypress’s proprietary West Bridge^® architecture, FX3S enables simultaneous links among storage media, application processor and SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0), allowing unrestricted three-way data flow for maximizing data transfer rate. EZ-USB FX3 CSP provides the industry-leading FX3 USB 3.0 peripheral controller in a Wafer-Level Chip Scale Package (WLCSP) that measures only 4.7 mm x 5.1 mm, more than a 75% footprint reduction from the FX3 controller’s Ball-Grid-Array package. For more information on Cypress EZ-USB SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0) solutions, please contact Cypress at usb3@cypress.com.

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About Cypress

Cypress delivers high-performance, mixed-signal, programmable solutions that provide customers with rapid time-to-market and exceptional system value. Cypress offerings include the flagship PSoC^® 1, PSoC 3, PSoC 4 and PSoC 5LP programmable system-on-chip families. Cypress is the world leader in capacitive user interface solutions including CapSense^® touch sensing, TrueTouch^® touchscreens, and trackpad solutions for notebook PCs and peripherals. Cypress is a world leader in USB controllers, which enhance connectivity and performance in a wide range of consumer and industrial products. Cypress is also the world leader in SRAM and nonvolatile RAM memories. Cypress serves numerous major markets, including consumer, mobile handsets, computation, data communications, automotive, industrial and military. Cypress trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol CY. Visit Cypress online at www.cypress.com.