ASIX Electronics Corp. announced sample availability of three new Flash microcontrollers with embedded Ethernet MAC/PHY, the AX11001/AX11005 and AX11015 family. The new AX110xx family is the world's first high performance 8-bit microcontroller to deliver the 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet MAC/PHY, the TCP/IP accelerator, and the Flash memory in a single chip. With this highly integrated system-on-chip (SoC) solution, the AX110xx family provides a very small form-factor solution to enable embedded system designers to design compact, low power, high performance yet low cost Embedded and Industrial Ethernet applications for the growing Embedded Networking markets.

The AX110xx family features a single-cycle pipelined 8051/80390 core (up to 100MIPS), 128 to 512KB Flash memory, and 32KB RAM. The embedded Ethernet PHY supports Auto-MDIX, which allows either the straight-through or crossover cables to be directly connected to the device easily. The AX110xx family supports serial communication interfaces such as I2C, SPI bus, three UART (with one supporting 921.6Kbps), and 1-wire. The parallel interfaces supported include external memory interface, local bus, and Ethernet MII. The timing functions can be achieved through a watchdog timer, three general-purpose 16-bit timers, and a 5-channel programmable counter array (PCA). There are four full ports of offering total 32 controllable IO lines (GPIO). The AX110xx family all supports run-time firmware or driver update through Ethernet or UART, the so-called In Application Programming (IAP).

Aside from supporting commercial temperature range (0℃~70℃), ASIX also provides a separate industrial temperature range version targeted for applications that need extended operating temperature range (-40℃~85℃).

There is a growing need to add network connectivity into every embedded systems. Based on reports by Forrester Research, by the year 2010, up to 95% of the devices used to access the Internet will be non-PC devices that use an embedded system. In other words, the network connectivity of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication will be the primary market demand for the embedded networking system for the years to come. Ethernet’s ease of use, cost effectiveness, high bandwidth, stability, security, and a high degree of compatibility makes it a natural solution for accessing the Internet. In addition to SOHO and corporate networks, Ethernet is gradually making its way into consumer and household devices as a primary way to access the Internet, satisfying both the stability and reliability demanded by industrial users and the bandwidth and multimedia connectivity demanded by home consumers

ASIX's new AX110xx family single-chip microcontrollers leverage its core competency in Embedded Ethernet design to provide customers with industry leading integration and performance. This makes the AX110xx family ideal for a number of growing applications including home appliances, factory/building automation, industrial equipments, security systems, remote control/monitoring/management, and streaming media applications such as POS terminals, vending machines, IP camera, Internet radio, automatic meter reading, environmental monitoring systems, network sensors, networked UPS, Serial to Ethernet adapter, and Ethernet to ZigBee bridge, etc.

To help customers evaluate and develop with AX110xx family platform, ASIX provides comprehensive technical support information in a Development/Reference Design Kit. The Kit includes the hardware and software application notes, user guides, schematics, PCB layout guide, and the firmware C source code for the AX110xx family with free of charge. In addition, ASIX also offers several versions of platform available for customers’ development purpose.

Limited samples of the AX110xx single-chip microcontroller with TCP/IP and 10/100M Fast Ethernet MAC/PHY are available now, and volume production is scheduled in August 2006. The chips are offered in RoHS compliant version.

For more information on AX11001/AX11005 and AX11015 family, please contact ASIX Electronics Corp. via e-mail: sales@asix.com.tw, or visit web: www.asix.com.tw.