Nu Horizons launches industry's fastest PCIe 2.0 UART series

Nu Horizons Electronics announces the availability of the industry's fastest PCIe 2.0 UARTs from Exar, with serial data rates up to 25Mbps. The XR17V352/354/358 XR17V352/354/358 series offers designers of advanced low voltage and low power boards a complete single-chip endpoint solution, eliminating the requirement for external PCIe-PCI bridge and thereby reducing component count. Additionally, the XR17V352, at 9mm x 9mm is the smallest two-channel compliant device in the industry.

The three-part XR17V352/354/358 series of two, four and eight channel UARTs (universal asynchronous receiver/transmitters) includes features such as an on-chip PCIe PHY and PCIe digital controller, support for large FIFO sizes (256 bytes) and optimised software drivers. These devices are ideal for remote access servers, storage network management, factory automation, and point-of-sales (POS) systems.

All the devices share a common set of features including PCIe 2.0-compliant interface, large FIFO sizes of 256-byte TX/RX that optimise overall data throughput, automatic hardware (RTS/CTS or DTR/DSR) flow control, automatic software (Xon/Xoff) flow control, RS-485 half duplex direction control with programmable turn around delay, and Infrared (IrDA 1.1) data encoder/decoder. In addition, the series shares other features including a fractional baud rate generator, 16 GPIO pins, and multi-drop mode with auto half-duplex transceiver control. Software drivers are available for Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7, QNX as well as Linux. In order to minimise overall power consumption, these devices operate from a single 3.3V volt power supply with the core operating at 1.2V.

Evaluation boards, reference designs, and software drivers are available.