September 2010

Easy Interface to USB from Lattice and FTDI

According to Intel, USB is found in over 6 billion devices. Although originally designed for personal computers, the USB interface is now commonly used in a wide variety of consumer applications. USB has become a standard communication interface for many computer peripherals, consumer electronics and portable devices.

Typically, PLDs and FPGAs cannot support the USB Electrical Specification and require an external USB transceiver such as the Future Technology Devices International (FTDI) FT2232 device. The FT2232 is an easy-to-use, low-cost, small-sized complete USB solution that can be programmed to support JTAG, I²C or one of several other protocols.

Designers can easily connect a PLD to a FT2232 device using a FIFO, SPI, UART or another serial interface that is supported on the FTDI USB IC. A number of reference designs showing some of these functions are available from Lattice.

To Learn More

Both FTDI and Lattice provide designers a number of free resources to speed up new designs. For further information, visit the Lattice web site at www.latticesemi.com/ftdiusb.