Philips Intros PCA951x Family of Bus Devices
Philips Semiconductors (San Jose, CA) announced a new family of I²C devices that will help designers build bigger I²C systems for maintenance and control applications in CompactPCI (PICMG2.9) and AdvancedTCA (PICMG3.X) architectures. The advanced architectures allow more extensive remote system management and configuration control of communication boards, power supplies and controllers to significantly increase system reliability.
The PCA951x family of hot-swappable I²C bus buffers (consisting of the PCA9510/11/12/13/14) can also be used in normal I²C bus or SMBus applications. The PCA951x devices communicate between system boards allowing insertion and removal of the boards into an active I²C system without corrupting the data on the I²C bus. The devices are designed to simplify the task of using a bus to manage a large number of boards in network server, desktop PC or telecom environments.
The PCA951x products are offered in both eight-pin SO and TSSOP (MSOP) packages, and are available for $1.60 in quantities of 10,000. The PCA9511/13/14 are currently released to production. The PCA9510/12 are sampling and production is planned for the second quarter of 2004.
