December 10, 2013 – Silicon Labs (NASDAQ: SLAB, Country Manager In-gyu Kim), a global leader in high-performance analog-intensive mixed-signal ICs, announced the release of a high-performance bridge controller (product name: CP2130) provided as a turnkey solution for USB host and SPI (serial peripheral interface) connections, along with driver support for Windows, OS X, and Linux operating systems.

Silicon Labs’ new CP2130 bridge controller, which connects from USB to SPI, delivers industry-leading data throughput, excellent configurability, and highly integrated mixed-signal integration in a space-saving 4 mm x 4 mm package. The CP2130 bridge controller is ideal for creating new designs or upgrading existing ones for a wide range of USB-enabled embedded applications, including USB dongles, tablets, portable controllers and testers, blood glucose monitors, docking stations, PoS products, data logging modules, and card readers.

As USB is widely used in the embedded industry, developers are seeking cost-effective solutions to accelerate time-to-market, and Silicon Labs has developed the CP21xx bridge family to meet this objective. Using the CP2130 bridge controller, developers can add USB functionality to their applications without requiring the more complex expertise in USB software, firmware, or hardware required by other alternatives. The CP2130 bridge controller complements Silicon Labs' entry-level CP21xx smart interface portfolio and adds SPI to the product list of USB-UART, I2C/SMBus, and I2S interface solutions.

The highly integrated CP2130 controller features on-chip and peripheral characteristics that eliminate the need for external components, enabling reductions in bill-of-materials (BOM) costs and board space. The CP2130 device includes a USB 2.0 full-speed controller and transceiver, a wide range of slave SPI interfaces operating as low as 1.8V, 384 bytes of memory, crystal-free USB operation, and a 100mA 5V voltage regulator.

With the flexible configuration of the CP2130 device, the SPI controller can communicate with up to 11 SPI slave devices using 11 GPIO pins as chip selectors, or be configured for other uses to remove external circuitry and components. The CP2130 device is the fastest USB bridge controller on the market, providing up to 6.6 Mbps read throughput and 5.8 Mbps write throughput.

Geir Førre, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Microcontroller Business Unit at Silicon Labs, said, “More and more developers are relying on Silicon Labs’ cost-effective and easy-to-use USB Smart Interface as a way to eliminate complexity when adding USB to embedded systems. We designed the new CP2130 USB-SPI bridge controller with design simplification in mind, creating a highly integrated interface solution that provides developers with everything needed to add USB, enabling reduced costs and complexity, as well as shortened time-to-market.”