USB - Silicon Manufactures

By allankliu Feb 15th, 2009

USB development

When an engineer starts to develop a USB product, he should have an overview of USB products. Check out following questions in your work sheet:

Chip development

Go to FPGA supplier (Altera/Actel/Xilinx) or IP suppliers (ARM/MIPS/NXP/Intel) to get support on IP of USB.

Hardware

Which USB products? USB host? USB devices? or USB OTG? Or new products such as USB wireless or USB3.0?
Which speed grade? Low speed? Full speed of 12M? Hight speed 480M? Even USB3.0 upto 5.4G?
Which processor is preferred? 8bit like 8051/AVR/PIC? or 16/32bit such as ARM, x86?
Which solution is preferred? Stand alone solution or one chip solution?
Is there any simple solution for your products? Such as USB-IO/FIFO, USB-UART, USB-SPI, USB-I2C, USB-IrDA bridge ICs?
Is there any ready ASSP for your products already? Remember there are many chip vendors who might have the chip you wanted.

Software

Here software is software running in host operation system. It depends on your design.

Linux: OHCI, UHCI, EHCI core and/or driver support
Windows: dedicated kernel and/or driver support
MAC OS:
RTOS: commercial USB software stack and/or driver support. (This part indeed required experise in OS awareness.)

Firmware

Based upon silicon you choosed, you can get firmware and reference design from your suppliers. Most of them have already finish the dirty job for you. You just add application code into existing firmware library.

Vendor IDs

Officially you have apply for Vendor IDs from USB certification program. However it takes time and money to do that. Developer can use vendor IDs from silicon suppliers such as Cypress.

Silicon selection

USB SIE is available from some major IC companies. So USB chip is also widely available from worldwide. Silicon suppliers are major semiconductors vendors who have microcontroller product lines, small startup companies since USB is pretty in IC design, and Taiwanese companies where produced most PC mainboard and periperals in the world.

Most of the major silicon vendors have its own USB solutions, such as

USB device controller,
USB host controller,
microcontroller with USB device controller,
microprcessor with USB host/device controller.
USB bridges IC (UART, I2C, SPI, Parallel, SPI).
USB Hub

Of course there are some ASSP USB ICs such as:

USB mouse/keyboard/joystick/pointer
USB audio (USB audio is not very popular, while now it is getting more application in Skype phone)
USB IrDa (Basically UART/USB bridge but with IR pluse modulation/demodulation inside. Up to 4Mbps)
USB Bluetooth (microprocessor with USB device controller)
USB Consumer IR (Used in HTPC or Windows Media Center Edition, not integrated with PC chipset)
USB Flash reader IC & Mass storage IC
USB Scanner IC
USB video capture (Typical ASSP)
PCI Express host/device controller (Remember, PCI Express )
USB smartcard IC (secure controller with USB device controller)
USB Ethernet IC

Analog ICs for USB are:

USB Charger ICs
USB protection ICs and components
DC/DC

Candidates

Silicon offers USB/UART bridge IC and 8051 microcontroller with USB.

Atmel has many USB products, based upon AVR/AVR32/8051/ARM7/ARM9/Cortex, dedicated for USB device controllers, secure controller with USB, digital camera

Cypress get 80251 based original device controller design from Intel, then acquired product lines from Scanlogic, Anchor. So Cypress is pretty active in USB market with many reference designs including embedded hosts, low/full/high-speed peripherals and hubs. Some Cypress USB device controllers support host bootstrap mode, which is very flexiable in device microcontroller firmware development. Cypress has EZ-USB, EZ-Host, EZ-OTG and SL811HS, ISDxxx, M8 and enCoRe, Wireless USB. The naming convention of USB products are confusion because most of the products are acquired. AN2131 is used for Keil U-Link JTAG debugger.

NXP offers standalone USB device controller, host controller, OTG controller, transceivers, IPs, ARM7/ARM9 with USB host/device/OTG inside, wireless USB, and smartcard with USB interface and contactless interface.

OKI (ARM7/ARM9 with USB inside)

SMSC (8051) High speed performance of USB hubs and ULPI phy transceivers, flash controller, reader.

STM offers 8051/ARM7/ARM9/Cortex based USB prodcuts.

TI, 8051 based USB controller, hubs, OTG, transceivers, streamming ICs and RF micro with USB.

Renesas Technology is a recognized pioneer in the development of USB silicon Devices successfully passing the USB Compliance Program and having its devices adopted on a large number of USB products already on the market. Renesas supplies a rich lineup of MCUs, ranging from small-package devices for Low-Speed USB application to Full-Speed MCUs, Hi-Speed MCUs, Hub MCUs, ASSPs using our own IP, System LSI and Hi-Speed devices, addressing the diversified needs of our customers and supporting all different types of products.
Features in devices, general purposes MCUs, ASSPs and System LSIs. Based upon SuperH, H8, M16/20, 38000,740, 7600...

Fujitsu: Industrial applications are increasingly requiring USB resources. Fujitsu aims to target this demand with the MB90330/335 series.
The line-up offers high-performance 16-bit MCUs (F2MC-16LX family) with built-in USB 2.0 compliant macros, supporting USB-Function and simplified USB-Minihost. This allows a USB device to act either as a USB-Host or as a USB-Function. In this way, USB peripheral devices can exchange data without the mediation of a PC.

Freescale offers USB for 68K and 68HCxx, which use CMX USB stack.

Microchip offers PIC18F USB microcontrollers.

PLX Technology offers USB host controller with 8/16bit Async. local bus and PCI bus.

Silabs offers 8051 based USB device controller, and USB-UART / USB-SPI / USB-I2C / USB-Parallel bridge ICs and USB FM Radio / Mass Storage / USBXpress / Firmware programming / HID

FTDI USB periperal ICs are very unique in the market. FTDI is the first company who offers USB-UART, USB-Parallel and USB-FIFO ports with VCP driver. This allows developer focuses on application software development in hst without being involved too much in detail in firmware programming and driver devlopment in host. A lot of open source projects and development tools are developed upon FTDI chip. Such as USB-I2C(master), USB-SPI, USB-JTAG and USB-BDM.

NEC USB Home site

NEC Wireless USB home site

AnalogicTech Introduces Compact USB Battery Charger IC

Atech offers USB OTG controller, Flash controller, MP3 codec, IDE controller

Omnivision offers USB camera bridge IC.

CSR offers Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS product lines with USB interfaces.

Moschip offers USB bridge ICs, USB/UART, USB/EPP, USB/Ethernet

WCH in Nanjing, China, who deliveries USB/PCI bridge IC in embedded host, device, UART, EPP, IrDa, memory stick controller, MIDI bridge and etc. Sorry web is in Chinese only. If anyone wants to know more, contact me for translation.

Taiwanese

USB ASSP from Ali Taiwan.

Myson offers USB mass storage controller IC.

Chesen offers a lot of USB-OTG and USB mass storage ICs.

Polific Taiwan, The Company started out by developing Smart I/O IC solutions, focusing on niche USB/IEEE 1394 bridge controller products. The PL-2303 USB-to-Serial Bridge Controller is a low cost and high performance single chip solution. It provides a simple and easy way to use bridge/connectivity between the Universal Serial Bus (USB) and Serial Port interface.