Professional Windows® Embedded Compact 7

FTDI DEVICES

Future Technology Devices International (FTDI) is a semiconductor manufacturer based in Scotland, that is well known for its USB to serial integrated circuits. The main attraction for using its devices is that they come with royalty-free drivers, although not in source form. FTDI provides device drivers for Windows Embedded CE from CE 4.2. Because the Compact 7 architecture is largely unchanged from CE 6, the current CE 6 FDTI driver can work with Compact 7. Two drivers are available from FTDI for its devices: the Virtual COM Port (VCP) driver and the Direct (D2XX) driver.

A typical FTDI-integrated circuit is the FD232R, a USB to serial device, as illustrated in Figure 44-1. As outlined in Figure 44-2, it implements a USB device interface on one end with an RS232 serial asynchronous receiver and transmitter (UART) interface on the other. Internally it takes the serial signals and translates them to USB signals as the USB to Serial protocol.

FIGURE 44-1

FIGURE 44-2

FTDI make available a range of these integrated circuits with varying functionality with various USB bit rates and RS232 BAUD rates. The FT232R supports fast USB (bit rate maximum of 10M bps) and BAUD rates up to 3M. Although this chip is only compatible with the faster USB 2 (480M bps), other FTDI devices ...