PCI compliant UART

has introduced the industry's first multi-channel 66MHz PCI 3.0 compliant Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART) product family.

The XR17V25x products provide a direct interface to the PCI bus eliminating the need for a PCI-Local bus bridge, reducing system cost and board space requirements.

First in the series of single chip multi-channel 66MHz devices is the eight-channel XR17V258. The device features 3.3V supply, fractional Baud Rate Generator, PCI Bus Power Management 1.1 support, 16-bit programmable timer/counter, and 32-bit of data loading and unloading. It is register-set, package and pin compatible with Exar's existing 33MHz XR17C158 (5V) and XR17D158 (Universal) PCI UART devices.

The XR17V258 consists of eight 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.

In addition to the fifth generation set of configuration registers, the 66MHz device has new enhanced registers, and meets the high bandwidth and power management requirements of communication systems.

Each UART channel includes a fully programmable TX and RX FIFO level triggers, FIFO level counters, 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 XR17V258 also offers sleep mode with wake-up indicator feature that allows for lower power consumption.

The XR17V25x series is supported by Exar's PCI software drivers that support leading operating systems.

The eight-channel device, XR17V258, is offered in a 144-pin TQFP package, and is priced at $26 in 1,000 pieces quantities. The device is available for sampling now.

Additional multi-channel devices in this product family will be offered later this year.