Santa Clara, CA — (press release excerpt) — LinkUp Systems Corporation today announced its L7210 system-on-chip (SoC) solution, a low-power, high-performance processor for smart cellular phones, wireless Internet terminals, PDAs, music players, and Internet appliances. The L7210 includes an ARM720T processor with sophisticated power management, Bluetooth interface compatibility, Universal Serial Bus… (USB) connectivity, ACLink serial audio codec interfaces for 16-bit stereo sound, plus an on-chip hardware Secure Digital (SD) Card controller. LinkUp supports the L7210 with Embedded Linux and several other popular embedded operating systems.

Like the other members of LinkUp's successful L72XX family, the L7210 is designed to provide a complete processor plus peripherals solution on a single chip. The L7210 adds a third UART, a 80KB on-chip SRAM, and a SD Card controller, while maintaining pin and register compatibility with the current L7200 and L7205 products from LinkUp Systems.

The power-saving L7210 is specifically targeted at the smart cellular phone and wireless Internet terminal market, which demands long battery life. The L7210 SoC is fabricated with the latest 0.18 micron technology to provide high performance and run at just 1.8V. The L7210 offers system designers five levels of power management and even at full power, requires less than 100 milliwatts.

The SD Card controller allows the L7210 to power and provide secure storage to devices such as smart cellular phones, which offer voice, fax and Internet capability along with the ability to play secure music files. The SD Memory Card, a sophisticated memory device about the size of a postage stamp, offers a combination of high storage capacity (currently 32 MB and 64 MB), fast data transfer, flexibility, and security.

In addition to interfacing with popular communications-oriented DSPs, the L7210 includes a display subsystem capable of controlling 800×600 color or monochrome LCD panels. A memory subsystem, also integrated, offers controllers for both a 16-bit wide SDRAM memory and static memory control for 16 or 32-bit wide SRAM, Flash, ROM and external input/output.

Controllers for PC Card/CompactFlash and MultiMediaCard flash-based storage and Smart Card are also included on the chip. An 8-channel DMA controller supports the transfer between system memory and the rich set of on-chip peripheral controllers. The serial communications subsystem includes three asynchronous communication controllers (UARTs), slow/medium/fast IrDA controllers, master/slave synchronous serial port (SSP), and Synchronous Peripheral Interface (SPI).

A USB function controller and an OHCI-compliant USB host controller provide additional connectivity. In line with LinkUp's strategy to support the latest technologies and open standards, the three UARTs have been designed to support the popular Bluetooth standard by upgrading the UARTs to 920 kbps rate.

A 32-bit real time clock and two 16-bit timer/counters provide system control for the L7210. The system includes 73 general-purpose input/outputs (GPIOs).
General sampling of the L7210 device will begin in Q2 2001, with mass production scheduled for Q4 2001.

The device is priced at under $25 per unit in quantities of 10,000. Development systems, device drivers, software framework, sample code, documentation, build and development tools are also available. Additionally, LinkUp has developed four complete Internet access device reference designs which are available to OEM customers developing systems based on the L7210. These include designs for a PDA; TV set-top box; a web pad; and a screen phone.

 
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