Dual port controller can reduce system bill of materials

The Texas Instruments FPC202 dual port controller works as a low-speed signal aggregator for common port types such as SFP, QSFP, Mini-SAS HD, and others. The FPC202 aggregates all low-speed control and I2C signals across two ports and presents an easy-to-use management interface to the host (I2C or SPI). Multiple devices can be used in high-port-count applications with one common control interface to the host. The device is designed to allow placement on the bottom side of the PCB, underneath the press-fit connector, to simplify routing. This localised control of the ports’ low-speed signals cuts system BOM cost by allowing the use of smaller I/O count control devices (FPGAs, CPLDs, MCUs) and by reducing routing layer congestion. The device can pre-fetch data from user-specified registers in each module, making the data readily accessible to the host through a fast I2C (up to 1MHz) or SPI (up to 10MHz) interface. Also, the controller can trigger an interrupt to the host whenever critical, user-configurable events occur associated with any of the ports under its control. This eliminates the need to continuously poll the modules.