DESIGNCYCLETHE
ADVANCED TECHNIQUES FOR DESIGN ENGINEERS
■ BY FRED EADY
THUMBS UP FOR THE
VINCULUM-II TOOLCHAIN
The Vinculum-II embedded dual USB host controller takes all of the hard
work out of interfacing and controlling USB devices. In this case the
Vinculum-II goes one step further to save us both money and time. We
don’t have to design and fabricate a specialized printed circuit board (PCB)
to put the Vinculum-II host controller to work. For about $15 plus shipping,
you and I can obtain the embedded dual USB host controller IC and all of its
associated resistors, capacitors, ferrite beads, and interface pins mounted on
a spiffy factory-grade PCB.
A VINCULUM-II EXPANSION BOARD
Odds are that your Vinculum-II project thoughts aren’t
exactly the same as mine or the reader in the next town
or the reader down the street. In that the FTDI folks have
provided an inexpensive Vinculum-II carrier board for its
32-, 48-, and 64-pin parts, taking the time and expense to
design and manufacture a generic Vinculum-II embedded
dual USB host controller carrier PCB would be nothing
more than reinventing the development board wheel.
I just happen to have a 64-pin variant of the Vinculum-II
expansion board. The default logical and physical layout of
it is drawn up in Schematic 1. The hardware is under the
lens in Photo 1. The expansion board interface pins are
arranged to fit perfectly into any 0.1 inch pitch perfboard.
Thus, we can literally plug our expansion board into a
relatively inexpensive perfboard-based embedded dual USB
host controller design. No unique PCB is required.
past Design Cycle discussions to writing some Vinculum-II
firmware.
THE VINCULUM-II TOOLCHAIN
ENOUGH OF THE VINCULUM-II
HARDWARE ALREADY
14 October 2010
Up to this point, our Vinculum-II
discussion has revolved around the
hardware and the theory that stands
behind it. If you’ve ever worked with
any computing device, you know
that understanding the hardware
design is just as important as
understanding how to talk to the
intelligent hardware components via
firmware. With that thought in mind,
let’s apply what we’ve learned
about the Vinculum-II hardware in
Like any other toolchain support product, the Vinculum-II
toolchain begins life after a successful installation on a PC hard
drive. The mainstay of our toolchain is the Vinculum-II IDE. Like
most other IDEs (Integrated Development Environments), the
Vinculum-II IDE allows the programmer to create projects, edit
files, compile code, program devices, and debug application code.
