Solutions » What’s CSSP?

What’s CSSP?

  • Offers designers the integration and flexibility to accelerate time-to-market and differentiation in the mobile market
  • Provides a unique combination of hard logic and ultra-low power programmable fabric based on our patented ViaLink™ technology for adapting CSSPs as market conditions change, resulting in longer time-in-market
  • Includes small footprint packaging, or die, that maximizes printed circuit board (PCB) real estate, hence reducing Bill of Materials (BOM) costs
  • Enhances processors to support emerging new standards and customer feature requirements, resulting in improved user experience

QuickLogic CSSP Platform Concept

Answers to Mobile Market Designer Challenges

QuickLogic® Corporation helps mobile product system architects and designers face these increasingly difficult design challenges:

  • Desire to move from mass production to mass customization
  • More complex products with varying feature sets
  • Shrinking product development schedules and budgets
  • Consumers’ insatiable demands for more features with longer battery life and small product size

These challenges require a more flexible approach to system design once an application or baseband processor has been chosen.

CSSP Solution

QuickLogic solves these challenges with our award winning PolarPro® and ArcticLink™ Solutions Platform families. These solution platforms can be configured to support a varied array of functionality with proven system blocks that allow for unique custom designs or product variations in all of these market segments:

CSSP Solution Platforms

ArcticLink™ II Solution Platforms

The ArcticLink II Solution Platform with integrated VEE technology directly addresses the challenges confronting hand-held mobile multimedia device OEMs and ODMs. As consumers demand a higher quality user experience from mobile devices, OEMs and ODMs must leverage R&D investments and maximize the return on the design effort. With more video content moving to mobile devices, technical challenges for designers become more complex and battery life increasingly a critical factor. The ArcticLink II Solution Platform family is specifically designed to address the issues of battery life and user experience, while providing the flexibility critical to portable and mobile devices.

ArcticLink™ Solution Platforms

The ArcticLink Solution Platform family specifically meets the unique connectivity of handheld devices, which demand integration of multiple functions with high-performance and flexibility. The ArcticLink Solution Platforms are designed to effectively support hardwired building blocks such as, Hi-Speed USB 2.0 On-The-Go (OTG), SD/SDIO/MMC/CE-ATA, and other connectivity and custom functions using an ultra-low power array of programmable fabric

PolarPro® and PolarPro® II Solution Platforms

The PolarPro and PolarPro II Solution Platform family was purposely architected to meet the interconnect and system logic requirements of power-sensitive and portable applications. The PolarPro Solution Platform family offers a spectrum of options with varying amounts of programmable fabric, embedded SRAM, programmable I/Os and advanced clock management. It is an ideal platform to implement connectivity solutions such as SD/SDIO/MMC/CE-ATA, IDE (P-ATA), high-speed UARTs, and PCI among others.

QuickLogic Connectivity Companion Solutions

The ArcticLink and PolarPro Solutions Platform’s programmable fabric customizable building blocks provide a compact, single-chip solution that:

  • Reduces BOM costs
  • Saves board space
  • Eases system-level design trade-offs
  • Improves the end product’s time-to-market and time-in-market

What is a CBB?

A customizable building block (CBB) is a unit of measurement that represents the on-chip logic that can be used to implement a variety of proven system blocks such as SDIO, PCI, IDE, CE-ATA and NAND Flash controller, to name a few, or custom logic or other system level functions.

QuickLogic Proven System Block Options

Storage
IDE/P-ATA Host Controller supports
  • All 1” and 1.8” IDE/P-ATA HDDs
  • Data throughput of up to 33 MByte/sec with UDMA
  • Lower processor overhead for ATA timing and polling operation
CE-ATA Host Controller supports
  • 4-bit and 8-bit CE-ATA HDDs
  • CE-ATA 1.1 compliant peripheral interface at speeds up to 52 MHz
  • Hardware implementation for CMD-60 and CMD-61 to lower host processor overhead
NAND Flash Controller supports
  • Single Level Cell (SLC) NAND flash with 2-bit hardware ECC/EDC
  • Hardware support for wear leveling and bad block management
Secure Digital (SD) Card Host Controller supports
  • Secure Digital 2.0 standard with support for Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC)
  • 1-bit and 4-bit operation at speeds of up to 52 MHz
Compact Flash (CF) Host Controller supports
  • 8-bit and 16-bit Compact Flash interface
  • Memory and I/O modes for CF card and peripherals
  • True IDE mode for CF micro hard drives
Multimedia Card (MMC) Controller supports
  • MMC 4.1 standard for MMC and high capacity SIM card
  • 1-bit, 4-bit, 8-bit operation with speeds up to 52 MHz
Memory Stick (MS) Controller supports
  • Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro standards
  • Theoretical maximum data transfer rate of 480 Mbps
  • 4-bit, 8-bit and serial interface widths
Managed NAND Controller with Boot Capability supports
  • Elimination of the need for NOR Flash in the system
  • Booting from any SD/MMC-based Managed NAND device with support for SDHC devices of 4 GBytes and above
  • SD/MMC controller is SD 2.0 compliant with support for SDHC devices for Managed NAND densities of 4 GBytes and above
  • Supports the latest eMMC standard
  • Supports multiple SD/SDIO/MMC devices or cards on the same bus
Optical Drive Controller (ATAPI) supports
  • CD and DVD ROM connectivity (ATAPI)
  • Enhanced support for simultaneous DVD ROM and hard disk drives
  • Throughput of greater than 13 MByte/sec
  • Off-loading the application processor from managing the overhead of ATA timing and polling operations
Network
Hi-Speed USB Controller supports
  • Hi-speed USB 2.0 OTG with integrated high-speed PHY
  • 12-signal ULPI interface available through programmable fabric
  • 8 KByte SRAM on-chip buffer to improve data transfer performance
  • Dedicated DMA controller to off-load CPU from heavy data transfer and manipulation
High-Speed SDIO Controller supports
  • High-speed SDIO host controller with clock frequency up to 52 MHz
  • Compliance with the latest Secure Digital 2.0 standard
  • SPI, 1-bit and 4-bit modes
  • Rx/Tx FIFOs for higher performance and throughput
  • DMA support for reducing processor bus utilization
MiniPCI for Ethernet, Wi-Fi/WiMAX Controller supports
  • Leveraging of low-cost PCI-based Wi-Fi modules
  • Up to 264 MByte/sec PCI bus performance, zero wait states
  • Master and target functions for 32-bit data at speeds of 33 and 66 MHz
  • Full compliance to PCI specification 2.3, and Cardbus and Compact PCI compatible
SPI Controller supports
  • High-speed SPI master controller with clock frequency up to 52 MHz
  • Low cost, low pin count wireless connectivity solution
  • Simple driver architecture customizable to enhance Wi-Fi performance
Bluetooth 2.x + EDR High-Speed UART supports
  • High-speed UART supporting Bluetooth 2.x with up to 4 Mbit/sec data rate
  • Configurable baud rate customized for different application requirements
  • Configurable flow control and FIFO access
SDIO Client supports
  • SD v2.0 and SDIO v1.2 compliance with multifunction SDIO support
  • SD 1 bit, SD 4 bit and SPI mode up to 50 MHz
  • Hot insertion/removal, interrupt, Read Wait, Suspend, and Resume
  • CRC7/CRC16
USB Hub supports
  • Hi-Speed USB upstream port with built-in Hi-Speed USB PHY
  • Each downstream port supporting Full-Speed at 12 MByte/sec and Low-Speed at 1.5 Mbit/sec operation
  • Customizable number of downstream ports
  • Transaction Translator (TT) optimized for maximum bandwidth utilization
Video and Imaging

Visual Enhancement Engine (VEE™) supports
  • TV-quality visual experience in mobile devices through dynamic range control
  • Greatly enhanced image and video quality even under low backlight or bright ambient conditions
  • Dramatically improved battery life by reducing backlight
MIPI DSI with Built-in D-PHY supports
  • Display standard develop by the MIPI alliance; up to WVGA resolution
  • Serial interface to reduce pin count, power and cost
  • Lower noise and much improved reliability through hinge of clamshell, swivel and slider phones
X/Y Swap supports
  • X/Y Swap Operation
  • Frame rate conversion for VGA, NTSC and PAL
  • Power management for stopping all subsystem clocks and shutting down the SDRAM frame buffer
  • Configuration from the host application processor via I2C-compatible bus
High-definition LCD Controller supports
  • Configurable resolution up to 1024x768
  • Programmable display aspect ratio
  • Configurable vertical and horizontal scan frequencies
  • Maximum color depth of 24 bits per pixel
  • Embedded SRAM/(Mobile) SDRAM/DDR-SDRAM controller for frame buffer
Intelligence
Direct Memory Access (DMA) supports
  • Fully customizable DMA controller
  • Lower CPU utilization
Smart Data Transfer (SDT) supports
  • Onboard intelligence that enables direct port-to-port data transfers, without involving the host CPU bus
  • Significantly improved speed for large file transfer, enhancing user experience and increasing battery life
Data Aggregator (DA) supports
  • Aggregation of multiple, independent data paths
  • Interface-standard agnostic via multiple proven system blocks and programmable fabric
  • Significantly simplified connections to multiple standard devices via one data pipe to host
Security and Custom Options
Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM) supports
  • C2 cipher algorithm implemented in hardware
  • Working in conjunction with QuickLogic SD/SDIO or P-ATA host controllers
  • Key stored securely in hardware
  • Optimization for SD-Video performance
Serial ID supports
  • Secure numeric ID, as long as 256 bits can be implemented in the programmable fabric of any PolarPro or ArcticLink Solution Platform
  • Unique number in each CSSP device controlled by a list of desired values provided by OEM/ODM

CSSP Packages

In the mobile market, semiconductor package size is a critical requirement and often will impact whether a differentiating feature will be added to a product. QuickLogic partners with industry leading packaging vendors and makes significant investment package technology development to ensure we are delivering CSSPs optimized for the cost, board space and reliability needs of the mobile market. Figure 3 illustrates the various packaging types QuickLogic supports today including small foot print BGA packages and wafer level CSP.

Packaging types

CSSP Software Drivers

Development teams are continually finding that successful product delivery is highly dependent on the availability of robust software, including drivers, middleware and applications. QuickLogic understands this and firmly believes that a “solution” is more than just a semiconductor device – a “solution” includes software drivers that can be integrated seamlessly into a companys board support package (BSP). QuickLogics system software team has experience delivering drivers for Windows CE, Windows Mobile and Linux operating systems.

Software drivers supported by QuickLogic’s CSSP Solution

CSSP Development Flow

Close collaboration between QuickLogic and our customers and partners ensures the products delivered to market meet the expectations. QuickLogic Customer Solutions Architects (CSAs) work with our customers at the system architecture level in order to define a CSSP specification. Then, QuickLogics System Solution Team (SST) implements the CSSP and works on-site with customers to ensure a successful integration into the final system. Figure 4 below illustrates this flow.







Development Flow