New from LinkUp Systems, the L7210 is a low-power, high-performance processor for smart cellular phones, wireless Internet terminals, PDAs, music players and Internet appliances

The industry's first SoC with an on-chip hardware Secure Digital (SD) Card controller, the L7210 includes an ARM720T processor with sophisticated power management, Bluetooth interface compatibility, Universal Serial Bus (USB) connectivity, and ACLink serial audio codec interfaces for 16bit stereo sound.

This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 7 February 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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Like the other members of LinkUp's successful L72XX family, the L7210 is designed to provide a complete processor plus peripherals solution on a single chip.

The L7210 adds a third UART, an 80Kbyte on-chip SRAM, and an SD Card controller, while maintaining pin and register compatibility with the current L7200 and L7205 products.

The power-saving L7210 is specifically aimed at the smart cellular phone and wireless Internet terminal market, which demands long battery life.

The L7210 SoC is fabricated with the latest 0.18um technology to provide high performance and runs at just 1.8V.

The L7210 offers system designers five levels of power management and even at full power, requires less than 100mW.
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The SD Card controller allows the L7210 to power and provide secure storage to devices such as smart cellular phones, which offer voice, fax and Internet capability along with the ability to play secure music files.

The SD Memory Card, a sophisticated memory device about the size of a postage stamp, offers a combination of high storage capacity (currently 32 or 64Mbyte), fast data transfer, flexibility and security.

In addition to interfacing with popular communications-oriented DSPs, the L7210 includes a display subsystem capable of controlling 800 x 600 colour or monochrome LCD panels.

A memory subsystem, also integrated, offers controllers for both a 16bit-wide SDRAM and static memory control for 16 or 32bit-wide SRAM, Flash, ROM and external input/output.

Controllers for PC Card/CompactFlash and MultiMediaCard flash-based storage and Smart Card are also included on the chip.

An 8-channel DMA controller supports the transfer between system memory and the rich set of on-chip peripheral controllers.

The serial communications subsystem includes three UARTs, slow/medium/fast IrDA controllers, master/slave synchronous serial port (SSP), and Synchronous Peripheral Interface (SPI).

A USB function controller and an OHCI-compliant USB host controller provide additional connectivity.

In line with LinkUp's strategy to support the latest technologies and open standards, the three UARTs have been designed to support Bluetooth operation at 920Kbit/s.

A 32bit real time clock and two 16bit timer/counters provide system control for the L7210.

The system includes 73 general-purpose I/Os.

General sampling of the L7210 device will begin in Q2 2001, with mass production scheduled for Q4 2001.

The device is priced at under $25 per unit in quantities of 10,000.

Development systems, device drivers, software framework, sample code, documentation, build and development tools are also available.