THine releases new serial transceiver products

These products enable reductions of system cost, size, and weight, and provide future options to add new sensors with minimal design efforts.

THCS253 and THCS254 are the industry-first unique LSI products that can serialise different types of signals and can allow users to add additional sensor functions to systems by only changing registers’ settings.

For example, THCS253 can serialise sensing signals using 32 GPIO interfaces into 2 differential signals that can drastically reduce the number of cables and connectors by up to 88%. Users obtain excellent advantages not only in lowering costs, shrinking sizes, lowering weights, and reducing noise emission from many cables, but also in improving productivity and quality in manufacturing processes by simplifying assemblies that previously would require many cable interconnects.

These new serial transceivers enable systems to be easily expanded with newly required sensing demands in the future. These types of expansions previously required extensive redesign efforts with high redesigning costs, but with the THCS253 or THCS254, only simple changes to registers’ settings are required. Users can set 32 GPIO pins on the THCS253’s and 20 GPIO pins on the THCS254’s as their intended signals. These serial transceivers also support up to 2 systems of I2C in addition to supporting independent clock signals of the main system board and of the function board with sensors, touch panels, etc. These industry-unique products allow future expansion for additional features on the same platform systems with minimal redesign efforts or any use of FPGAs that require time-consuming redesigns.

Since THS253 and THCS254 can reshape waveforms in their receiving circuit, they can transmit data for long distances of 10 metres. In general, without these new products, transmission distances of only about 1 metre would be possible. This allows users to have excellent flexibility in the layout of manufacturing sites or warehouses.

“THine’s new serial transceiver products can help innovative customers to achieve optimal and flexible design for smarter cable wiring in their digital transformation systems,” said Mr. Yoichiro Minami, President and COO of THine. “It is our great pleasure to contribute to customers’ valuable solutions for minimising costs and time-to-market as well as improving performance, flexible design and hardware reliability.”

Applications:

• Printers, projectors, and compact consumer electronics with wide flexible flat cables for miniaturising.
• Industrial equipment for measuring, analysis, inspection, and manufacturing with expensive fine coaxial cables for reducing costs of cables.
• Drones and unmanned vehicles with batteries for reducing weight.
• Autonomous warehouse robotics, factory AGVs (automated guided vehicles), manufacturing robotics, and vending machines with independent controlling signals required to the main circuit board and the function board of sensors, touch panels, and near field communication for simplifying the controlling systems.
• AI-enabled sensing systems with independent clock signals in the AI-processing board and the sensing board for simplifying the wiring design.

Major features of THCS253/THCS254:

• Support up to 32-bit GPIO
• Full duplex communications by two pairs of differential signals
• Support up to 8-bit low speed GPIO in stand-by mode with low power of 6 mA
• I/O expansion available by conversion from 2-wire serial interface to parallel GPIO
• Adaptive equaliser supports high-loss transmission media
• 8B10B encoding/decoding
• Digital noise filters can be set for input and output
• Error detection and notification
• External reference clock frequency: 9-133.3MHz
• Built-in spread spectrum clock generator (SSCG)
• Single power supply operation: 1.7V - 3.6V
• Wide range of IO voltage: 1.7V - 3.6V
• Operating ambient temperature range: -40°C to 85°C
• Package: THCS253 QFN64 (9 x 9mm), THCS254 QFN48 (7 x 7mm)