September 26, 2012 – Cypress Korea (General Manager Young-do Lim, www.cypress.com ) announced that Himax Imaging, Inc., a leading CMOS image sensor manufacturer, selected Cypress’s EZ-USB® FX3 peripheral controller for its USB 3.0 5M sensor evaluation board.

This evaluation board can be used with various image sensors, including popular models such as HM5065 (5M), HM3451 (3.4M), HM2056/2057 (2M), HM1375 (1.3M), and HM1055 (HD), which are widely used in applications such as PC cameras, document scanners, and industrial cameras.

The Cypress FX3 is the industry's first and only programmable USB 3.0 peripheral controller. Additionally, the EZ-USB FX3 features a flexible General Programmable Interface (GPIF™ II) that can connect to almost any system in 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit configurations, boasting data speeds of up to 400 megabytes per second. GPIF II enables the FX3 controller to directly interface with various application processors, ASICs, or FPGAs. This flexibility is a key factor enabling Himax Imaging's sensor evaluation boards to interface with a wide range of image sensors.

Himax Imaging’s launch of an industry-leading Full HD sensor evaluation board accelerates the momentum of HD camera applications in the USB 3.0 era.



“Just like its immediate predecessor, the FX2, the Cypress FX3 is becoming the de facto standard in the USB SuperSpeed solution market by providing best-in-class performance and flexibility,” said Lim Young-do, General Manager of Cypress Korea.

“Sensor performance is central to camera design, and our evaluation boards serve as a stepping stone to success for our customers. With the help of the Cypress FX3 total solution, we were able to overcome design challenges very quickly. The high degree of flexibility, stability, and ease of use of the FX3 contributed significantly to the successful and timely launch of our HD sensor evaluation board,” said Antonio Tsai, Deputy Director of Marketing at Himax Imaging.

Cypress EZ-USB FX3
The EZ-USB FX3 provides SuperSpeed USB 3.0 connectivity for virtually any system. Along with 512KB of RAM, the on-chip ARM9 CPU core delivers 200 MIPS of computational power and can be utilized for applications requiring local data processing. In addition, the FX3 provides interfaces for connecting to serial peripherals such as SPI, UART, I2C, and I2S. Simply put, the FX3 offers highly flexible and integrated features that allow developers to add USB 3.0 connectivity to any system.

The Cypress EZ-USB FX3 is currently in mass production and can be used in small 121-ball BGAs with a size of 10 mm x 10 mm x 1.2 mm and a pitch of 0.8 mm. For more information regarding the EZ-USB FX3 controller, please refer to www.cypress.com/go/usb .

Himax Imaging
Himax Imaging, a subsidiary of Himax Technologies, Inc., is a fabless semiconductor company that develops CMOS image sensors (CIS), system-on-chip (SOC), and wafer-level camera solutions for next-generation camera, video communication, and sensing applications. As a relatively new player in the CIS industry, Himax Imaging has rapidly developed a broad portfolio of products and technologies that have been adopted by leading mobile computing and communications device manufacturers.