Technical Information CB3-TONE • CompactPCI® USB 3.0 Controller
Theory of Operation
Hardware
The CB3-TONE is equipped with the TI
TUSB7340 single chip PCI Express® to USB 3.0
bridge. The xHCI (SuperSpeed) compliant host
controller supports up to four downstream
ports. Each downstream port may be
independently enabled and has individual
power control and overcurrent detection.
SuperSpeed USB 3.0 offers ten times the data
speed of USB 2.0 (5 Gbit/s compared to 480
Mbit/s). The bandwidth of the xHCI controller is
shared over all TUSB7340 downstream ports.
Texas Instruments provides xHCI compliant
Windows® drivers for download at
www.ti.com/product/tusb7340#toolssoftware.
Performance Considerations
As with any
CompactPCI® Classic
peripheral
card, the backplane bandwidth is the limiting
parameter if performance is discussed. Up to
~2Gbps data throughput is available across a
32-bit CompactPCI® backplane @66MHz. The
data rate of a SuperSpeed USB port however is
rated at 5Gbps. As a result, the maximum
performance which can be achieved with the
CB3-TONE is significantly higher than with
previous USB 2.0 solutions, but considerably
below the USB 3.0 maximum.
As an alternate for applications which require
optimum performance, you might consider a
similar peripheral card based on
CompactPCI®
Serial
(www.ekf.com/s/serial.html).
Beyond the bandwidth discussion, the
CB3-TONE is a reliable and economic USB 3.0
controller card, which can be simply integrated
in any industrial CompactPCI® system.
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