Cypress introduces the industry's smallest USB 3.0 Hub controller

     Cypress Semiconductor today announced that its EZ-USB HX3 USB 3.0 hub controller is available in a small package. The 6 mm x 6 mm spherical solder Array (BGA) package saves board space on ultrabooks, tablets, portable port extenders, and other mobile and consumer devices, while offering the best feature set in the HX3 controller industry, such as strong interoperability, extended charging support, and full configurability.

     The universal EZ-USB HX3 USB 3.0 hub controller offers full configurability with I2C EEPROM, I2C Slave and GPIO options, enabling designers to configure PHY drive capability, number of downlink ports, power switch polarity, LED indicators and more. The HX3 also offers "Ghost Charging" to charge devices without a host, and supports USB-IF v1.2 as well as the battery charging standard for Apple devices.

     The HX3 is the first SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0) hub controller to feature an accessory charging docking station, enabling uplink charging of portable devices using a USB On-The-Go (OTG) host. HX3's Shared Link feature can have up to eight downlink ports, allowing products such as docking stations and desktop displays to connect to more USB peripherals via a four-port Hub. HX3 is highly interoperable and has been fully tested with more than 400 USB peripherals, including popular consumer electronics, PC peripherals, HDDS and SSDS, as well as traditional devices.

     Mark Fu, Senior Director of Cypress's USB 3.0 Business unit, said: "USB 3.0 ports are already common in personal computers and are now starting to appear in mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Product designers need smaller, more energy efficient USB 3.0 port expansion solutions to enable further miniaturization and low power consumption of their mobile devices. The 6 mm x 6 mm package of our HX3 controllers saves space and helps designers achieve their goals of providing design flexibility, low power consumption and top performance in this tiny package. We are also working to offer a smaller 10 mm2 chip-scale package option that can reduce the size of the HX3 solution by another 70%."

     The EZ-USB HX3 hub controller's on-chip USB 2.0 and SuperSpeed PHY can be configured to maintain signal integrity over long PCB lines. The High-speed slope, Transmit Amplitude, and De-emphasis parameters can be adjusted through the graphical user interface on the PC. The HX3's standby power consumption is 40 mW; With all ports operating at SuperSpeed data rates, power consumption is 50% less than competing solutions.