Cypress Korea (Country Manager Young-do Lim, www.cypress.com ) announced that Cypress and Nuvation Research have launched a rapid-prototyping solution that simplifies streaming video, images, and other data from Altera FPGAs to host processors at speeds of up to 400 megabytes per second.

This solution includes a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 device interface board that connects to Arrow Electronics' BeMicro SDK (Software Development Kit), a popular FPGA evaluation platform featuring Altera Cyclone IV FPGAs. The new USB 3.0 expansion board enables BeMicro users to prototype simpler, uncompressed, and cost-effective alternatives to existing slower interfaces such as USB 2.0 and Gigabit Ethernet.

Designed for seamless out-of-the-box connectivity, a new interface board from Cypress and Nuvation (Cypress’s Platinum Design Partner) is called BeUSB 3.0 and is available exclusively at Arrow Electronics. This new board utilizes Cypress’s programmable EZ-USB® FX3™ USB 3.0 device controller to implement the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 standard.

In addition, this interface board comes with a standard cable for attaching to the BeMicro SDK and connecting to a USB 3.0 PC host that provides up to 900 mA for bus power. These BeUSB 3.0 boards are excellent products for starting development for systems requiring high-quality streaming video and images, data acquisition systems, and other applications that require an FPGA to interface with USB 3.0.

The EZ-USB FX3 peripheral controller on the BeUSB 3.0 expansion board features Cypress’s configurable second-generation General Programmable Interface (GPIF™ II) capable of supporting data rates of up to 400 megabytes per second. GPIF II enables the FX3 to interface directly with any processor, ASIC, or FPGA using the graphical user interface (GUI) tool, GPIF II Designer.

The easy-to-use GUI helps system designers configure the GPIF II interface according to their needs by selecting one of several popular interfaces, such as asynchronous and synchronous slave FIFOs or SRAM. They can also design their own interfaces using an intuitive state machine canvas. The on-chip ARM9® CPU core with 512KB of RAM delivers 200 MIPS of computational power for applications requiring local data processing. The FX3 provides highly flexible and integrated features that enable developers to add USB 3.0 connectivity to any system. For more information regarding Cypress's EZ-USB FX3, please refer to the website http://www.cypress.com/fx3 .

“The BeUSB 3.0 interface card will enable Altera FPGA and BeMicro users to accelerate their designs by providing seamless connectivity between the FX3 and Altera FPGAs,” said Lim Young-do, General Manager of Cypress.

“Cypress solutions will open new markets for both Cypress and Arrow and provide customers with the superior technology needed to address diverse video, image, and data transmission requirements,” said David West, Vice President of Supplier Marketing and Asset Management at Arrow Electronics.

For more information regarding the BeUSB 3.0 board, please refer to http://arrownac.com/CypressFX3 . This board is used with the BeMicro SDK board, and both the BeUSB 3.0 and BeMicro SDK boards are available for purchase from Arrow Electronics.