USB 3.2 Peripheral Controllers

Since its introduction, USB has developed very quickly, evolving from the original 1.0 to the 2.0 by increasing by 40 times the data rate. With the continual push for higher speed came USB 3.0, which offered yet another 10x speed increase, reaching 5 Gbps. High-capacity hard disk drives and high-speed cameras started taking advantage of the high data rate and made USB the go-to interface for storage, video streaming, and data acquisition applications.

Since then, the USB bandwidth has been doubling every 4 years – from 5 Gbps to 10 Gbps, and then to 20 Gbps – keeping pace with the insatiable appetite for speed from the most demanding applications.

New EZ-USB™ families

For over a decade, EZ-USB™ FX3 has played a critical role in machine learning applications, serving as the gold-standard building block for providing USB 5Gbps connectivity to machine vision cameras, spectrum analyzers, and many high-bandwidth data acquisition systems.

With the growing digitalization of the real world driven by AI, the demand for databases and higher-speed interfaces has been rocketing across all industries. After tens of millions of dollars invested in the development of the next-generation general-purpose USB peripheral controllers, Infineon launched the new EZ-USB™ FX5, FX5N, FX10, and FX20, with up to 600% higher performance, an optimized PCB area and BOM cost, and extensive support (firmware, DVK, documentation) to facilitate quick development and a shorter time to market.

USB 3.2 can be leveraged in many diverse applications, ranging from factory automation to medical and life sciences, from retail to security and surveillance.

Some key application categories include cameras (machine vision, endoscope, dental intraoral, ultrasound, x-ray, multi-sensor, and DSLR), FPGA modules & SOM, test and measurement (oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and spectrum analyzers), interface converters (10GBASE-T, PCIe), frame grabbers (HDMI, SDI, Camera Link, CoaXpress), and scanners (3D, document).

New speed levels, such as USB 10 and 20Gbps, can unlock further emerging applications, bringing digitalization into new and varied fields.

• Industrial automation
• Robotics

Machine vision for industrial automation is a big and diverse market that has enjoyed double-digit annual growth in the past 10 years. With increasing sophistication of machine learning and the abundance of high-speed cameras, machine vision is expected to continue its growth trajectory in the next 10 years, touching even more applications and industries. USB 3.2 is the heart of machine vision, ensuring flawless imagining and video streaming from 5 Gbps onwards while at the same time proving power-over-cable convenience, plug-and-play simplicity, and software interoperability.

• Machine vision