Seiko Epson Corp. will be the first vendor in Japan to mass produce an LSI (large-scale integrated circuit) chip, which supports the new USB (Universal Serial Bus) On-the-Go (OTG) standard, the company announced Wednesday. The controller chip allows mobile devices to be directly connected to each other without a PC.
A USB interface allows for connectivity between a host PC and a peripheral device for data exchange via a cable, and this standard has been adopted for many mobile devices such as digital still cameras, MP3 players and PDAs (personal digital assistants).
As a result of the growing need for such mobile devices to communicate directly with each other when a PC is not available, the Universal Serial Bus Implementers Forum (USB-IF) released the new USB OTG standard supplement for vendors last December.
The Netherlands’ Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV is a leading developer, and several vendors including Seiko Epson have started developing LSI chips that support USB OTG, a Seiko Epson spokesman said.
The Suwa, Nagano Prefecture, company’s S1R72 controller LSI, which achieves a data-transmission speed up to 12M bps (bits per second), is embedded with three functions that will allow for switching the host and peripheral relationship between two mobile devices without changing the cable connection, Seiko Epson said in its statement.
The company plans to start mass producing the chip from September. The sample price is expected to be