| Out in Front |
You can program I-Cube’s BitSwitch family of serial switch matrixes to serve as cross-point switches, multiplexers/demultiplexers, signal routers, concentrators, or flexible interconnects. The first two devices in the family, the IQX160 and IQX128, come with 160 and 128 I/O pins that you can program for input, output, or bidirectional functionality. The bit-oriented, serial, nonblocking devices feature a pin-to-pin delay as low as 7.5 nsec in a flow-through mode or a 133-MHz clock rate in registered mode. The company plans to add four members to this family of SRAM-based devices. Future members will provide 64 to 320 programmable I/O pins, 6-nsec pin-to-pin delays, and 150-MHz clock rates (on low-pin-count devices). The units support 3 and 5V operation on the I/O pins.
You can access the device’s in-system-programmable I/O and control using a parallel interface for fast incremental configuration of switch-matrix and I/O-port attributes. The device also supports JTAG and can use this serial interface for programming. Data-flow mode can be flow-through, pipelined with programmable delays, or latched. You can also program the control blocks to perform multicast or time-division-multiplexed functions. You can also program I/O ports for clocks; clock enables; input and output, three-state operation; and delays. The IQX160 and IQX128 cost $30 and $25, respectively (10,000).—by Stephen Kempainen
I-Cube Inc, Campbell, CA. (408) 341-1888, ext 107, http://www.icube.com.
| EDN Access | feedback | subscribe to EDN! |
| design features | out in front | design ideas | departments | products |