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| Cypress Unveils West Bridge Embedded Systems Architecture Cypress introduces a new architecture for dedicated peripheral controllers that serve as functional bridges to rapidly evolving interface standards and provide high-performance, optimized data paths for a wide range of embedded applications. Cypress also announces the first product based on this new architecture, a peripheral controller designed to optimize data throughput in multimedia handsets. Devices in the new West Bridge family of peripheral controllers function as a companion chip to an embedded central processing unit to free it from data-intensive operations. In the same way the North Bridge and South Bridge were introduced in the PC architecture to enable the main CPU to evolve independently from quickly changing memory and peripheral interfaces, embedded systems are evolving towards a similar architecture, where a West Bridge device manages the interfaces and offloads from the main CPU specific peripheral-to-peripheral traffic. The West Bridge family is based on Cypress's Simultaneous Link to Independent Multimedia (SLIM) architecture, which manages multiple, dedicated paths between peripherals, memory and the processor to allow maximum data throughput. In addition to providing a path to interfaces not supported by the main processor, the SLIM architecture allow direct and independent data transfer from one interface to another, offloading the main CPU, and freeing up its resources for higher system performance. The first member of the family, the West Bridge Antioch controller, uses the SLIM architecture to provide a direct path in mobile handsets from High-Speed USB 2.0 to Mass Storage (NAND, SD, MMC, HDD) for rapid transfers of music files, photos and videos. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Networking News :: home page |