Product category:
Communications ICs (Wired)
News Release from: Cypress Semiconductor | Subject: West Bridge Astoria
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 11 December 2007
West Bridge controller cuts Flash media
costs
Controller supports up to 16 MLC NAND Flash devices, which cost approximately three times less than single-level cell NAND Flash devices for the same storage density.
Cypress Semiconductor has introduced a new West Bridge peripheral controller with multilevel cell (MLC) NAND Flash support that enables designers to use lowest-cost, highest-density Flash storage The West Bridge Astoria controller supports up to 16 MLC NAND Flash devices, which cost approximately three times less than single-level cell (SLC) NAND Flash devices for the same storage density
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 7 Feb 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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These new features allow the Astoria controller to connect to any embedded processor or DSP, bringing MLC NAND support to new applications including portable media players (PMPs), wireless cards, dongles, portable navigation devices (PNDs), digital cameras, POS terminals and more.
By fully offloading management of USB and storage from an embedded processor, the West Bridge Astoria peripheral controller saves critical processor resources and maximises data-transfer performance.
The controller marks the debut of Cypress's fast-interleaving N-Xpress MLC NAND Flash control technology, with static wear-levelling, bad block management and 4bit ECC (error correction coding) to support up to 16 SLC/MLC NAND devices.
The storage port can be configured so designers can select up to two SDIO devices such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, and SD cards, making Astoria ideal for applications such as data cards and dongles.
Astoria also supports other types of storage from a list that includes Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) v2.0, MultiMedia Card+ (MMC+) v4.2 cards, CE-ATA for HDD, as well as various types of controlled NAND.
The flexible processor interface enables connection to most embedded processors adding a selection of asynchronous SRAM, ADMUX (address data multiplexing), SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) and NAND interfaces to the pseudo-CRAM interface of Antioch.
"Cypress's West Bridge Antioch controller has enjoyed success by delivering the fastest sideloading between a handset and a PC, allowing users to download 1Gbyte of storage in less than a minute", says Alakesh Chetia, vice president of Cypress's West Bridge Business Unit.
"Our new Astoria controller delivers this data-transfer performance to a variety of processor and storage types using flexible processor interfaces, configurable storage interfaces, and our N-Xpress MLC NAND controller technology, expanding the West Bridge concept to multiple embedded applications".
"MLC NAND Flash is growing rapidly in popularity due to its higher densities and ever-expanding cost differential over SLC NAND", says Nam Hyung Kim, Director and Chief Analyst, Memory ICs and Storage Systems at the market research firm iSuppli Corp.
"With the steady increase in demand for higher density storage in all embedded applications, system support for MLC NAND will become a necessity".
The West Bridge Astoria controller features up to 27 programmable GPIOs and 16 USB endpoints.
It comes in a small 100-ball VFBGA package that measures only 6 x 6mm and 0.5mm pitch.
Additionally, Astoria supports standard handset frequencies such as 19.2 and 26MHz for clock input, removing the need for an additional crystal.
The new West Bridge Astoria peripheral controller is currently sampling with SLC NAND support (CYWB0224ABS-BVXI) as well as MLC NAND support (CYWB0224ABM-BVXI).
The device is expected to ship in production volumes in the first half of 2008.
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