On May 6, 2008, at 4:54 PM, Xiaofan Chen wrote:
> Ok it can not beat big USB related companies like NXP and Cypress.

In general, the "USB sticks" being discussed do NOT use the native  
USB capabilities of the CPU being "demonstrated"; there's an extra  
chip on there that does the USB-to-jtag or USB-to-DebugWire or USB-to- 
ICP conversion.  Sometimes the USB chip isn't even in the same CPU  
family as the "eval" chip, or isn't a CPU.  The TI "EZ430-f2013",  
which was one of the early examples in this genre, uses one of TI's  
stand-alone USB/serial for the USB interface, a large 64-pin CPU for  
the control functions, and the device the user gets to play with is  
that 14-pin 430f2013...  And I think my Luminary thing that's close  
actually uses an FTDI USB chip.  So the whole "USB stick" format  
thing isn't at all dependent on the manufacturer have "good", or even  
"any" USB support.

Note that the PIC32 eval board is pretty close to this sort of thing.

I find the format a mixed blessing.  Too many vendors don't give you  
enough access to the chip being evaluated (IIRC, the original silabs  
"toolstick" had one LED and was supposed only to demonstrate the SW  
tools, for example.  They've gotten better since then!)   And the  
direct-to-USB format makes support on non-windows platforms unlikely;  
there's usually too much to reverse engineer.

But they're really cute, too.

BillW

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