Exar has developed three new PCI Express (PCIe) UARTs (universal asynchronous receiver and transmitters) designed for high performance and low power.

The XR17V352, XR17V354 and XR17V358 are 2-, 4- and 8-channel devices, respectively, which serve as single lane PCIe bridges to two, four or eight independent enhanced 16550 compatible UARTs. All three are compliant to the PCIe 2.0 Gen 1 (2,5 GTps). In addition to the UART channels, they have 16 multipurpose I/Os (MPIOs), a 16-bit general purpose counter/timer and a global interrupt status register to optimise interrupt servicing.

In addition to this functionality, the V354 can be cascaded to have up to 12 UART channels using a single PCIe 1 lane, while the V358 can be cascaded to up to 16 UART channels.