Connect One Upgrades Connectivity IC

By Bernard Cole
iApplianceWeb
(02/09/02, 02:36:41 AM EDT)

Kfar Saba, Israel --- With a number of competitors hot on its heels to cultivate OEMs in the industrial and home electronics markets who want to quickly and easily Internet-enable their microcontroller based-appliances, Connect One Ltd. is now in production with its new third generation iChip Plus Internet controller.

Like its original iChip, the new enhanced version is designed to act as a companion chip to any of a number of standard 8-/16 bit microcontrollers that are at the heart at most home and industrial appliances. According to Alan Singer, Vice President of Marketing, iChip Plus is an updateable Internet peripheral chip that relieves any host processor from running Internet connectivity tasks and works with any (or no) operating system. Internet protocols and configuration parameters are stored in onboard flash memory.

Independent of the application for which the microcontroller was designed, the iChip Plus makes it possible for a builder of an industrial or home device to remotely update the application, with no Internet programming necessary to Internet-enable the product. Compared to its earlier progenitors in the family, the new iChipPlus incorporates many of their features as well as a number of new ones, said Singer, including Internet access over multiple connections: by dialup or wireless modems as well as over Ethernet-based cable or ADSL LAN connections.

To achieve this, said Singer, the company has added a number of new capabilities to the underlying silicon and firmware that allow support for several different modem types, including analog modems that support the standard Hayes AT command set (like Conexant's), and SiLabs ISOmodem, which has its own unique implementation of the AT command set for 2400 baud connectivity.

It also incorporates firmware code that enables setting the modem type for AMPS and GSM wireless modem protocols, and supports CDMA and TDMA protocols via the standard Hayes AT modem type. To support Ethernet connectivity, the Plus chip includes MAC drivers that support 10BaseT LANs when connected toCirrus Logic's Crystal LAN CS8900A Ethernet controller and Realtek's RTL8019AS Ethernet controller. iChip LAN adds support for ARP, ICMP, and DHCP protocols.

To the designer of industrial or consumer appliance there are only two modifications that need to be made to a design upgrading to the new iChip: a slightly different pinout, and the addition of one command to the existing one, called AT+iCPF, which enables dynamic switchover to different communications platforms.

A new evaluation board, II-EVB-100, is available as a development environment for 3.3-volt or 5-volt versions of iChip Plus. II-EVB includes iChip Plus, a SocketModem module, a 10BaseT Ethernet controller, and connectors for test and accessing an external wireline or wireless modem. Pricing for iChip Plus is $23 for over 10,000 units; $325 for the 5-volt II-EVB-100; and $350 for 3.3-volt version.