The two universal asynchronous receiver transmitters, (UARTs) XR16V598 and XR16V698, are 16Byte and 32Byte, respectively. According to Exar, the devices have a global interrupt status register, which identifies pending channels and services them, while the individual channel status reading is eliminated to improve efficiency. These require only one chip select and one interrupt line per device compared to the per channel requirement of old UARTs. They require only one clock source and has 5V tolerant input feature due to which it can handle input voltage levels greater than the supply voltage.

Exar claims that the devices also feature automatic software flow control, RS-485 half-duplex direction control with programmable turn-around delay and sleep mode with a wake-up indicator. The company added that these devices support Intel and Motorola bus interface with industry standard 16C550 register set and are compatible with older versions.

At 15 Mbps, the XR16V598/698 pushes past competitors’ offerings to support the high-data rate requirements found in advanced consumer and industrial applications, said Levent Ozcolak, vice president at Interface product line. In addition to supporting faster data rates, this octal UART family has a wide variety of features including 16- 32-, or 64-Byte FIFO as well as other enhanced capabilities such as automatic hardware/software flow control, fractional baud rate generator and a global interrupt status register.

Samples of the XR16V598 and XR16V698 are available in a 100-pin quad flat package. A thousand piece set of both XR16V598, and the XR16V698 is available for the mid-$13 range.

At the start of this year, Exar launched a dual-channel 8-bit integrated UART and RS-232 transceiver combination device family with support for data rates up to 1 Mbps and targeted at battery powered applications, including laptops, portable devices, desktop PCs.

The company was also the first to launched eight-channel XR16V798, the first 8 Mbps device in January 2006.

Source: ComputerWire daily updates