MCUs: ASIX unveils wireless audio/video MCU reference design

Targeted at, and making use of the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure in home and office environment, the new single-chip Wi-Fi SoC, AX220xx family provides cost competitive wireless connectivity solution for bridging uncompressed digital audio data, compressed digital video data and serial/parallel user data through interfaces over the Wi-Fi network.

In addition, ASIX will live-demo multimedia streaming video distribution scenario for its two new products: the AX33001, ARM9-based SoC with QoS Packet Flow Engine and Security Engine; and the AX88782/AX88613, 2/3-port Ethernet Switch Controller with QoS support. ASIX's leading USB-to-LAN Controller, AX88772/A family, for Nintendo Wii, Apple MacBook Air, UMPC, MID and Netbook applications and Non-PCI/SRAM-like embedded Ethernet controller will also be showcased at Booth .

The AX220xx family is a single-chip microcontroller with TCP/IP and 802.11 WLAN MAC/Baseband SoC solution offering high performance dual-CPU architecture with 1MB on-chip flash program memory and 96KB data memory for Main CPU and Wi-Fi CPU, TCP/IP accelerator, 802.11a/b/g compatible WLAN MAC/Baseband, Fast Ethernet MAC and peripheral interfaces targeted for wide varieties of applications which need wireless/wired LAN or Internet access.

With dedicated Wi-Fi CPU running Wi-Fi protocol suite, the AX220xx family provides simple, easy, small-form-factor chip and module solutions for enabling wireless connectivity for applications such as consumer electronics, networked home appliances, Wi-Fi speaker, industrial equipments, security systems, remote data collection equipments, remote control, remote monitoring and remote management.

The AX33001 is an ARM9-based single-chip Ethernet microcontroller with QoS Packet Flow Engine and Security Engine. It incorporates a 280MHz ARM926EJ-S CPU core, 16KB I-cache, 16KB D-cache, DDR controller and NAND/NOR flash memory interface.

A hardware accelerated QoS Packet Flow Engine supports comprehensive L2-L4 QoS functions and packet forwarding engine, Network Address Translation (NAT) for IPv4/IPv6 routing and translation and advanced traffic scheduling and shaping on its WAN port.

A Security Engine supports AES/DES/3DES encryption, SHA-1/MD-5 hash and Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code. The AX33001 provides wide varieties of connectivity interfaces including 2-port 10/100Mbps Ethernet MAC with MII/RMII interface, PCI Host Bridge controller, USB 2.0 Host controller and IDE ATA-133 controller.

The AX33001 is targeted at applications such as Multimedia Digital Home Gateway & Server, Secure Wireless IPv6 NAS Router among 3G Femtocell and WiMAX, ZigBee Gateway, IP-enabled POS Terminals, USB Device Server, Printer Server, Networking Attach Storage (NAS) and Multimedia Co-Processor for IP Camera, Video Conferencing and DVR.

The AX88782 is a single-chip 2-port 10/100M Ethernet Switch controller featuring a 3-port switching fabric with QoS priority management, three 10/100M MACs, two 10/100M PHYs and 8/16-bit SRAM-like host interface.

It is targeted at performance-sensitive embedded applications needing support of two Ethernet ports, typically one as LAN port and one as WAN port and supports a simple SRAM-like host interface, checksum offload engine and burst-mode access making it easy to provide high performance 2-port Ethernet connectivity solution for any embedded MCU.

The built-in switching fabric supports non-blocking wire-speed forwarding and four priority queues for advanced QoS functions including Port-Based, 802.1p VLAN, IPv4 TOS and IPv6 COS to prioritize voice, video, audio and data traffic delivery.

The product live-demo will take place at ASIX's Booth #545, at the McEnery Convention Center at ESC Silicon Valley 2009. To learn more, go to www.asix.com.tw.