USB to serial bridge devices suit industrial applications
A new family of USB to serial bridge devices has been introduced by Exar.
Aimed at industrial applications, the XR21B142x family provides a straightforward way to interface with RS-232 or RS-485 serial networks through USB using a minimum of components and PCB space.
The XR21B1420, XRB21B1422, and XRB21B1424 provide 1, 2, and 4 UART channels respectively. The XRB21B1421 provides a single channel UART and uses the native operating system HID driver.
The XR21B142x devices are fully compliant to the USB 2.0 specification with 12Mb/s USB data transfer rate, and are said to deliver higher data throughput compared to competing devices, especially when multiple channels are operating simultaneously.
Large 512byte transmit and receive FIFOs enable a maximum data throughput of 9Mb/s across up to four UART channels.
