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New Cypress West Bridge™ Controller Delivers The Market’s Fastest Sideloading For PMPs, PNDs, Wireless Cards, And Other Embedded Applications


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Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (NYSE: CY) today introduced a new West Bridge™ peripheral controller with Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND Flash support that enables designers to use lowest-cost, highest-density flash storage. The West Bridge Astoria™ controller supports up to 16 MLC NAND Flash devices, which cost approximately three times less than Single-Level Cell (SLC) NAND Flash devices for the same storage density.

The new controller delivers the same industry-leading, High-Speed USB data transfer performance as the West Bridge Antioch™ controller. In a recent comparison of data transfer performance in top multimedia handsets, industry analyst firm Semiconductor Insights found a phone that uses the Antioch controller transferred files twice as fast or faster versus the other phones tested, which all featured High-Speed USB. Full details of the comparison are available at www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=203101718." The Astoria controller adds to this performance with a configurable multimedia storage interface and flexible processor interface, easing connections to a broad range of embedded processors and mass storage devices. These new features allow the Astoria controller to connect to any embedded processor or DSP, bringing MLC NAND support to new applications including portable media players (PMPs), wireless cards, dongles, portable navigation devices (PNDs), digital cameras, POS terminals and more.

By fully offloading management of USB and storage from an embedded processor, the West Bridge Astoria peripheral controller saves critical processor resources and maximizes data-transfer performance. The controller marks the debut of Cypress’s fast-interleaving N-Xpress™ MLC NAND Flash control technology, with static wear-leveling, bad block management and 4-bit ECC (Error Correction Coding) to support up to 16 SLC/MLC NAND devices. The storage port can be configured so designers can select up to two SDIO devices such as Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, and SD cards, making Astoria ideal for applications such as data cards and dongles. Astoria also supports other types of storage from a list that includes Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) v. 2.0, MultiMedia Card+ (MMC+) v. 4.2 cards, CE-ATA for HDD, as well as various types of controlled NAND. The flexible processor interface enables connection to most embedded processors adding a selection of Asynchronous SRAM, ADMUX (Address Data Multiplexing), SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) and NAND interfaces to the Pseudo-CRAM interface of Antioch.

“Cypress’s West Bridge Antioch controller has enjoyed success by delivering the fastest sideloading between a handset and a PC, allowing users to download 1 GB of storage in less than a minute,” said Alakesh Chetia, vice president of Cypress’s West Bridge Business Unit. “Our new Astoria controller delivers this data-transfer performance to a variety of processor and storage types using flexible processor interfaces, configurable storage interfaces, and our N-Xpress MLC NAND controller technology, expanding the West Bridge concept to multiple embedded applications.”

“MLC NAND Flash is growing rapidly in popularity due to its higher densities and ever-expanding cost differential over SLC NAND,” said Nam Hyung Kim, director and chief analyst, Memory ICs and Storage Systems at the market research firm iSuppli Corp., El Segundo, Calif. “With the steady increase in demand for higher density storage in all embedded applications, system support for MLC NAND will become a necessity.”

The West Bridge Astoria controller features up to 27 programmable GPIOs and 16 USB endpoints. It comes in a small 100-ball VFBGA (Very Fine Ball Grid Array) package that measures only 6 mm x 6 mm and 0.5-mm pitch. Additionally, Astoria supports standard handset frequencies such as 19.2 MHz and 26 MHz for clock input, removing the need for an additional crystal.

About the West Bridge Family
Devices in the new West Bridge family of peripheral controllers function as a companion chip to an embedded central processing unit (CPU) to free it from data-intensive operations. In the same way the North Bridge and South Bridge were introduced in the PC architecture to enable the main CPU to evolve independently from quickly changing memory and peripheral interfaces, embedded systems are evolving towards a similar architecture, where a West Bridge device manages the interfaces and offloads from the main CPU specific peripheral-to-peripheral traffic.

The West Bridge family is based on Cypress’s Simultaneous Link to Independent Multimedia™ (SLIM™) architecture, which manages multiple, dedicated paths between peripherals, memory and the processor to allow maximum data throughput. In addition to providing a path to interfaces not supported by the main processor, the SLIM architecture allow direct and independent data transfer from one interface to another, offloading the main CPU, and freeing up its resources for higher system performance.

Availability and Photo
The new West Bridge Astoria peripheral controller is currently sampling with SLC NAND support (CYWB0224ABS-BVXI) as well as MLC NAND support (CYWB0224ABM-BVXI). The device is expected to ship in production volumes in the first half of 2008. A high-resolution photo of the controller can be downloaded at www.cypress.com/astoria_photo."

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 PSoC® Programmable System-on-Chip™, USB controllers, general-purpose programmable clocks and memories. Cypress also offers wired and wireless connectivity solutions ranging from its WirelessUSB™ radio system-on-chip, to West Bridge™ and EZ-USB® FX2LP controllers that enhance connectivity and performance in multimedia handsets. Cypress serves numerous markets including consumer, computation, data communications, automotive, industrial, and solar power. Cypress trades on the NYSE under the ticker symbol CY. Visit Cypress online at www.cypress.com.



Cypress and the Cypress logo are registered trademarks and West Bridge, Astoria, Antioch, N-Xpress, Simultaneous Link to Independent Multimedia, and SLIM are trademarks of Cypress Semiconductor Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.



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