Exar releases advanced development tools for industry's fastest USB 2.0 compliant UART series

FREMONT, USA: Exar Corp. announced the availability of advanced development tools supporting the industry's fastest USB 2.0 compliant UART series.

"Created with system architects in mind, and building on the market success of the USB UART series, these development tools will accelerate design implementation and time-to-market," said Rakesh Bhatia, director, strategic marketing, Interface Products Line. "Leveraging these tools, system architects can significantly reduce, or eliminate costly driver development efforts."

Supporting the USB UART series -- XR21V1410, XR21B1411, XR21V1412, and the XR21V1414 – the tools include evaluation boards and schematics for each device. In addition, layout and Gerber files are also available for these board designs. All board designs have passed USB 2.0 compliance and are listed on the USB-IF website.

Software drivers are available for Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and CE. These drivers are Microsoft WHQL® certified. Drivers are also available for Mac and Linux operating systems.

Exar's I/O Lab is an innovative web-based configuration tool that enables system designers to configure the XR21B1411 in a novel way. This Graphical User Interface (GUI) aids the designer to visualize how the General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) pins are configured at power-up so that they can be tailored to fit the needs of their design.

In addition to setting the GPIOs, the system architects can also configure various USB UART parameters such as Vendor ID, Product ID, Maximum Power Consumption, Remote Wake-up support, Manufacturer Strings, Product Strings, and default UART settings. The configuration file can be downloaded to program the XR21B1411 using the software driver and OTP programming GUI provided by Exar.