USB Bridges

EZ-USB™ FX3 ($25-40 chip, $79 board) made by the Taiwanese company Infineon  provide a bridge between parallel RGB and USB-3 host computers. The RGB interface looks very easy to use and is well documented. Up to 150Mhz DDR. The FX5 also supports 1/2/4/8/16 channel LVDS at rates of up to 1.25Gbits/s per lane.

FT600Q-B,  FT601Q-B, and  FT602Q-B   ($8.50), from a British company FTDI, connect USB-3 to single ended wires using a FIFO protocol. FT600 has a 16 bits wide data path. FT601 and FR602 are 32 bits wide. The 602 version supports UVC over USB, but only send YUV422. Different versions have 1/2/4 channels. The boards cost from $66 to $74.

FTDI FT232 family provides an interface between USB 2.0, and 1/2/4/8 bit parallel single ended wires in FIFO mode. They also support SPI, UART and I2C protocols. There are versions for 1/2/4 channels, and for power flowing to the board, or in either direction. They cost $38 to $42.

Sonic SN9C291B is a Taiwanese webcam chip. It bridges a 10 bit parallel DVP to USB 2.0 high speed and full speed. To enable useable video across USB 2.0, it supports both M-JPEG and H.264 video compression.

CH569/CH565 is a Chinese RISC-V microcontroller, but the target market is bridging. It supports USB 3 host, device and HUB, SerDes at 1.25 Gbits/s, CDC, DVP with 2 frame buffers at 8/10/12-bit data width @120Mhz, or 8/16/32 bit HSPI. $35 board. Sadly the Discord server and Open Source repositories are dead, maybe because the data sheets lack crucial details. This is a common problem with Chinese products.

OmniVision, a Chinese company produces many chips which can bridge between MIPI, DVP and USB. Two chips can also merge multiple MIPI camera inputs into a single MIPI output data stream.

TinyCLUNX SOM uses a Lattice NX-33 FPGA which includes both a MIPI and USB 3 device hard cores, so it can be used to bridge between MIPI and USB-3 while also doing custom pipeline operations.