New SuperSpeed book now available
Most PCs today, and many tablets, have USB 3.0 ports included but peripheral devices have been slow to market and this has been due to inadequate development tools. This has now changed!!
At Intel's Developer Forum in September 2014
Cypress Semiconductor introduced a $49, credit-card-sized development board that will enable SuperSpeed Technology to be accessible to a larger number of designers. A free set of software development tools are
downloadable and several accessory boards are also available.
This development board is shown below and
full details are available here. The board is based on the FX3 SOC which includes a 200MHz ARM CPU, 512KB 0-wait state RAM, a SuperSpeed USB Device Controller and PHY, a
parallel interface capable of 32-bit x 100MHz bi-directional data transfers with standard or user defined protocols, some low-speed serial interfaces (SPI, I2C and UART) and an integrated debugger.
I developed a Xilinx-based CPLD board
so that you could try out different GPIF II interfaces and Cypress decided to productize the board and sell it through their store; this is also shown below.
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I have been working with Cypress to produce a How-To book which was introduced at the same time and is now available from Amazon in English or Chinese.
It includes 130MB of examples which are downloadable from here.
These include Windows examples, FX3 firmware examples, GPIF II examples and Verilog examples. One of the FX3 examples is a CPLD_Programmer so output from the Xilinx toolchain can be directly programmed into the CPLD;
no additional hardware is required.
The book describes step-by-step what you need to do to be successful with a SuperSpeed Device Design - after reading the book you will discover that it's not that difficult after all!
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(c) 2007-2015 John Hyde, USB Design By Example
Page updated 16 March 2015