Triad Semiconductor to Introduce the World's First Via-Configurable Mixed Signal ARM Cortex-M0 Solution

August 25, 2011 --  Triad Semiconductor, Inc., the industry’s leading supplier of via-configurable mixed-signal ASICs, will demonstrate the company’s newly released TSX1001 Evaluation Board in their booth [visit booth #821] at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston on September 27th and 28th at the Hynes Convention Center. The Triad Team will be on hand to demonstrate the features of the TSX1001, the evaluation board, and the Keil software development environment. Triad’s system architects will be available to talk with exhibit visitors about cost-effective and rapid integration of mixed signal designs on Triad’s via configurable arrays – VCAs.

Systems designers across all market segments: military, industrial, medical, automotive and consumer need customized mixed-signal integrated circuits (ICs) to solve their cost, size, power, performance and reliability requirements. Unfortunately, traditional full-custom IC development has been fraught with risky, long and expensive development cycles that have kept many companies from obtaining the benefits of IC integration.

Triad’s vision is to make mixed signal IC design available to system and board-level designers without the delays, costs and risks of traditional approaches. Triad has been delivering this vision to system designers since 2004 with a growing portfolio of via configurable arrays (VCAs) that enable the development of optimized mixed-signal ICs in less than six months at a fraction of the cost of a full-custom design.

The TSX1001 Evaluation Board highlights the mixed signal capabilities of the TSX1001’s mixed-signal ARM® Cortex™-M0 processor solution. The TSX1001 contains an ARM Cortex-M0 running at 25MHz with 32Kbytes of EEPROM memory, 24Kbytes of SRAM, a single cycle multiplier, high speed GPIO, timer, PWM, UART and SPI controller. Along with this complete processor subsystem and peripherals the TSX1001 integrates precision analog functions including a 16-bit analog to digital converter (ADC), a 12-bit digital to analog converter (DAC), low-noise op-amps, general-purpose op-amps, and fully differential op-amps. All of the op-amps on the TSX1001 are bonded out to package pins to facilitate easy prototyping of analog circuits on the evaluation board’s prototyping area.

The TSX1001 Evaluation Board is a complete mixed-signal ARM software development system with support for ARM’s uVision4 integrated development environment (IDE) including an integrated debugger and simulator. The evaluation board has a rich set of peripherals including SD-Card, USB interface with power, RS232, push-buttons, LEDs, LCD screen and audio interface. All TSX1001 pins are mapped to headers and a prototyping area to facilitate evaluation and prototyping of new designs with the TSX1001.

The TSX1001 is implemented on Triad’s Mocha™-1 VCA. The Mocha-1 array contains the Cortex-M0 processor subsystem along with 75,000 ASIC gates, distributed memory blocks, configurable digital I/O, a PLL tile and a wide range of analog tiles containing: op-amps, capacitors, resistors, transistors, switches, ADCs, DACs, a band-gap and other analog resources. A single via-layer change to the Mocha-1 array was all that was required to customize the array into the TSX1001 design. Customers can engage with Triad to modify the TSX1001 design to add other digital peripherals, custom digital circuits, and analog signal chains to suit a particular application quickly and inexpensively to create an application specific mixed signal IC.

About Triad Semiconductor, Inc.

Triad Semiconductor, Inc., a privately held fabless semiconductor company with headquarters in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, develops, prototypes and produces mixed-signal ASICs. The company’s groundbreaking via-configurable array (VCA) technology delivers ASICs with silicon-proven analog and digital functions more quickly and at lower cost than traditional full-custom approaches. Triad’s single-mask, via-only routing cuts engineering effort and fabrication time, resulting in fast-turn prototypes and allowing design changes to be made at minimal cost. For more information, please visit http://www.triadsemi.com or call (336) 774-2150.