Evaluation/development modules for USB 3.1 technology

FTDI Chip has introduced a pair of hardware modules to complement its FT602 USB 3.1 (Gen 1) video class FIFO IC, which has now gone into full scale production.

The UMFT602A and UMFT602X units enable bridging of a FIFO bus to a USB3.0/1 host and are equipped with either HSMC or FMC (LPC) connectors providing engineers with a simple and straight forward platform on which to evaluate the functionality of the 32-bit FT602 devices, which can deliver up to 1920 x 1080 resolution at frame rates of 60fps, with up to 4 video input channels being made available. This is intended to hep engineers developing high performance multimedia applications, such as streaming of video content captured by HD camera systems.

The UMFT602A/X both incorporate 2 parallel slave FIFO bus protocols - a multi-channel FIFO and a 245 synchronous FIFO. Through their respective integrated FT602 ICs, these modules support USB 3.1 Super Speed (5Gbits/s) as well as USB 2.0 Hi-Speed (480Mbit/s) data transfer rates.

These module are also capable of delivering data burst rates of up to 400MBytes/s across a 32-bit parallel interface. The UMFT602X has a 70mm x 60mm form factor, while the UMFT602A has dimensions of 78.7mm x 60mm.

These modules have been designed so that they can plug directly into the majority of FPGA development platforms on the market, supplied by programmable logic vendors like Xilinx and Altera.

As daughter cards, the UMFT602A/X units will operate with a FIFO master board which has either a HSMC or FMC connectivity.