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In This Issue

   DSP Solutions
The latest word in Wireless
The power of 1V
Finally! Chip technology matches
  designer imagination

   Memory
New 64-Mbit SDRAMs
   now sampling
Hitachi, Mitsubishi and TI
  to develop 1-GB DRAMs

   Other Stories
Make your PCI bus
  perform 4x faster
TI-Japan, Matsushita develop
  1394 IC for digital video

   Product Update
Power+ FET pre-drivers
Test-drive the TMS320C54x

Trade Shows

Make your PCI bus perform 4x faster

A new family of PCI-to-Cardbus controllers from Texas Instruments gives designers four times the performance in their portable PC systems.

The devices use TI's high-performance pipelined FIFO architecture, enabling performance up to 132 Mbytes/sec, which is the theoritical maximum for a 32-bit, 33-Mhz peripheral component interconnect (PCI) bus. This capability gives designers four times the performance of competitive controllers. For portable PC users, this means new-found bandwidth to simultaneously run multiple applications, such as high-speed network and video processing. t The first two devices in the family, the PCI1250 and PCI1220, provide an interface among the PCI bus, two PC Card 16 or CardBus slots and the VGA controller for Zoomed Video equipped systesm. Zoomed Video allows full-motion video signals to be routed directly to the video controller, bypassing the PCI bus and freeing it up for more use by the CPU and other devices.

 The PCI1250 is the industry's most highly integrated PCI-to-Cardbus controller.

• Programmable IRQ pin assignments
• Universal PCI I/Os support for 3.3V/5V PCI
• Enhanced burst mode data transfers
• Advanced Power Management
• Internal zoom video buffers
• Card activity LEDs
• Four GPIOs
• Advanced Card Protection

The PCI1220 features the same leading-edge performance as the PCI1250 without the internal Zoomed Video buffers.

The PCI1250 will be available from TI in mid-April in a 256-pin BGA package for $16.52. The PCI1220 will be available from TI in mid-June in a 256-pin BGA package for $16.52. It will be available to the mass market in 4Q97. Suggested volume pricing in U.S. dollars.

 Expansion possibilities

The new PCI2030 from Texas Instruments now gives designers of desktop PCs, work-stations, network servers, add-in cards and docking stations a way to expand system flexibility and performance.

Part of TI's new family of PCI-to-PCI bridge chips, the device expands functionality by interfacing two 32-bit PCI buses for systems that require one or more additional PCI buses. In addition to systems that require more than the typical three or four PCI add-in card slots, PCI bridges are also implemented on some multifunction add-in cards to buffer the electrical loading that the add-in card presents to the PCI bus.

• High performance bursting at 132 Mbytes/sec
• Six clean, low skew clock outputs on the secondary bus. Unused clocks may be individually disabled to lower power consumption
• Two additional address decode windows that can be programmed as either memory or I/O windows.
• Subtractive decode support

The PCI2030 is available from Texas Instruments and authorized distributors in a 176-pin TQFP for $17 in 10,000-unit quantities.