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Exar Adds Three Intelligent Dynamic Clock Switch (IDCS) Devices to Market-Proven Clock and Timing Product Portfolio

Posted on: Monday, 28 March 2005, 09:00 CST

FREMONT, California, March 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Exar Corporation , a leading provider of high-performance, mixed-signal silicon solutions for the worldwide communications infrastructure added three Intelligent Dynamic Clock Switch (IDCS) devices to its market-proven clock and timing portfolio. The XRK7988, XRK7955, and XRK7933 offer high performance, integrated redundancy and minimized clock skew for mission-critical next- generation applications such as wireless base stations, network switches, routers, and storage.

Clock Strategy/Growing Product Portfolio

Leveraging an extensive foundation of analog and Phase Lock Loop (PLL) design expertise, Exar reaffirmed its position as a technology innovator with the introduction of these new IDCS devices. Today's announcement represents the third clock and timing introduction in the past year; the earlier devices included the XRK499x portfolio of 3.3 volt programmable skew clocks (XRK4991, XRK4991A, XRK49911 and XRK4993), and the IDCS products XRK79993 and XRK79892. Clocks perform the vital function of producing a timing reference and repeated impulses for synchronizing the overall system.

"These additions to Exar's growing clock and timing product portfolio -- now over 20 devices -- demonstrates the Company's commitment to this growing market and ability to deliver innovative solutions to today's design challenges," said Bahram Ghaderi, vice president and general manager, Network and Transmission Products Division. "Used in a broad range of applications, these highly-integrated devices have on-board redundancy capabilities that ensure maximum up time, and fail safe operation which enables optimal system performance."

Product Highlights

The XRK7933, XRK7955 and XRK7988 are cost-effective, low-skew 400 MHz clock generators for applications with redundant clock tree requirements. Each device is capable of generating five LVPECL outputs from two LVPECL inputs. Two of the output pairs regenerate the input signal frequency and phase, while the other three pairs generate 3x (for XRK7933), 5x (for XRK7955) and 8x (for XRK7988), phase aligned clock outputs. Whenever the built-in IRCS detects a failure on one of the two clock inputs, it automatically switches the PLL reference clock to the other input while minimizing the output phase transient. Additionally, the external PLL feedback can be used to provide zero delay buffer performance.

All three devices have a Dynamic Clock Switch (DCS) circuit that continuously monitors both input CLK signals. If the primary clock fails, the DCS will switch to a secondary clock that completes the phase and frequency alignment with minimum output phase disturbance.

"Developed for several growing applications, the XRK79xx series enables designers to pick the ideal solution for their project," said Sergis Mushell, senior strategic marketing manager, clock and timing products. "The XRK7933 with its 33.3 to 100MHz capacity targets a wide range of computing applications, while the XRK7955 at 25 to 125 MHz targets 10/100 Ethernet applications, and at 19.44 to 155.52 MHz the XRK7988 is ideal for OC-3 environments."

Packages, Prices, Availability and Additional Information

In 1,000 piece quantities, for commercial temperatures the XRK7933 is $8.75, the XRK7955 is $8.75, and the XRK7988 is $8.75. Samples of all three devices are available now in 32-pin, LQFP packages. Additional Information on the three products can be found at http://www.exar.com/product.php?ProdNumber=XRK7933 , http://www.exar.com/product.php?ProdNumber=XRK7955 and http://www.exar.com/product.php?ProdNumber=XRK7988 . Other Clock and Timing Products can be found at http://www.exar.com/area.php?areaID=11 .

About Exar

Exar Corporation designs, develops and markets high-performance, analog and mixed-signal silicon solutions for the worldwide communications infrastructure. Leveraging its industry-proven analog design expertise, system-level knowledge and standard CMOS process technologies, the Company provides OEMs innovative, highly-integrated ICs that facilitate the transport and aggregation of signals in access, metro and wide area networks. The Company's physical layer silicon solutions address transmission standards such as T/E carrier, ATM and SONET. The Company also provides one of the industry's most comprehensive family of serial communications solutions. Within this product offering, the low voltage and multi-channel universal asynchronous receiver transmitters are particularly well suited to support high data rate and increasing data transfer efficiency requirements for various industrial, telecom and computer server applications. In addition, the Company offers a portfolio of clock generation and clock distribution devices for a wide range of communications systems. The Company is based in Fremont, CA, had fiscal 2004 revenues of $67.2 million, and employs approximately 265 people worldwide. For more information about the Company visit: http://www.exar.com/.

Exar Corporation

CONTACT: Greg Kaufman, Marketing Communications, of Exar Corporation,+1-510-668-7000

Web site: http://www.exar.com/

Source: PRNewswire-FirstCall

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