Oxford Semiconductor Receives PCI Express Order From Axxon Computer Corporation
Milpitas, CA - Oxford Semiconductor, a semiconductor company specialized in systems interconnectivity, recently announced its first PCI Express (PCIe) serial connectivity device design win, placed by Axxon Computer Corporation. The volume order is for Oxford's OXPCIe952, part of the company's Expresso family of high-performance PCIe compliant products that began sampling in the fourth quarter of 2007.
Supporting dual serial and parallel port interfaces, the OXPCIe952 is ideal for a diverse range of applications requiring low density port expansion, including PC add-on cards, industrial PC, point of sale terminals, industrial control, building automation, network management and embedded systems. The OXPCIe952 incorporates Oxford's high-performance 950 UART technology with advanced MSI-X interrupt handling and bus master DMA, to bring high system performance and flexibility.
"Oxford is not only first to market with a product that meets our spec requirements, they have surpassed our expectations by delivering a part that is incredibly easy to design in, and presents us with a significant time-to-market benefit," said Kumar Bhatia, CTO at Axxon Computer Corp. "At the semiconductor level, it is a very high-performance device with the type of functionality, speed and power management that puts Oxford right at the forefront of the market. Add to that the software device drivers that Oxford has developed, and you have the optimal solution on the market today."
The OXPCIe952 is part of Oxford Semiconductor's Expresso family of PCI Express to Multi-Port Serial and Parallel Port expansion devices delivering high-performance, reliable, industrial-grade PCI Express-based connectivity expansion solutions to interconnect system processors with multiple serial peripherals.
Driven by the transition in processor-based systems and associated chipsets from PCI to PCI Express as the main peripheral bus, the Expresso family of OXPCIe952, OXPCIe954, OXPCIe958 and OXPCIe840 targets the PC peripheral, industrial control, point of sale, server, communications and embedded systems markets with two, four and eight serial port options plus a standalone parallel port device.
The new devices offer considerable performance, time-to-market and system cost enhancements over competing solutions, including PCI SIG certified PCI Express compliance, WHQL certified device drivers, a CPU overhead savings of up to 70 percent for eight ports at 1Mbps, easy device customization with the company's Oxide customization tool and 30 percent – 40 percent BOM savings.
"This design win represents yet another milestone for our Expresso family of PCIe compliant devices," stated Adrian Braine, marketing director for connectivity solutions at Oxford Semiconductor. "In October, we shipped and announced first to market end-point silicon. We believe this order represents another first in actual customer implementation, and is a further demonstration of our leadership in this market."
Oxford Semiconductor's Oxide Customization software comes as standard with all of its serial connectivity solutions, and is designed to accelerate product development and time to market of the company's high-performance solutions. It features an intuitive graphical user interface that enables simple "point and click" feature selection and text box entry for fast, error-free customization without resorting to source code editing. In short, it removes more complex, time consuming, error-prone manual editing of programming files and driver source code.
The proprietary software includes tools for developing EEPROM programming and .INF files, as well as tools for customizing the Device Properties page of the Device Manager. Leveraging the power of these tools, engineers can make complex changes to device and driver set-up in minutes, and with minimal knowledge of the underlying software.
Once customization is complete, the EEPROM can be programmed in-circuit through the Oxide's EEPROM interface, or it can be dumped to a programming file and the customized device driver package is then ready to install.
SOURCE: Oxford Semiconductor