Product category:
Communications ICs (Wired)
News Release from: Agere Systems | Subject: SATA-compliant serdes
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 05 September 2003
Serdes speeds SAN host adapter to market
Pacific Digital Corp is implementing Agere's standards-compliant high-speed interconnect technology in its next-generation host adapter for storage area networking applications.
Pacific Digital Corp, a leader in storage and multimedia solutions, is implementing Agere's standards-compliant high-speed interconnect technology in its next-generation host adapter for storage area networking (SAN) applications Agere is supporting the design of Pacific Digital's upcoming high performance Serial ATA (SATA) storage controller for entry and mid-range servers using Agere's SATA-compliant serialiser-deserialiser (serdes) technology
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 8 Mar 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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Agere, a leader in providing SoCs for storage applications, has one of the broadest portfolios of serdes and high-speed interface technology in the industry.
Agere offers SATA interfaces for both 1.5 and 3Gbit/s, enabling data throughput of 150 to 300Mbyte/s.
Agere's interface portfolio supports speeds from 155Mbit/s to 10Gbit/s, and offers unparalleled integration into SoCs compliant with most industry standards including 1, 2, and 4 Gigabit Fibre Channel, 1.5 and 3Gbit/s SATA and SAS, SCSI, PCI, PCI-X, PCI-X 2.0, PCI Express, SPI-3/4/5, SFI-4, serial RapidIO and XAUI.
"Agere was able to provide the best ASIC solution for our next-generation storage architecture", said Jalil Fadavi, Vice President of Engineering at Pacific Digital.
"We selected Agere because of the company's proven ability to successfully integrate standards-compliant serdes technology into SoCs".
The solution for Pacific Digital is being built on Agere's new multiprotocol platform for host-side application-specific ICs across multiple serial interface standards.
Agere's flexible platform and system-on-a-chip integration expertise offers drive makers and system OEMs substantial time-to-market savings as well as improved cost and reliability for their chosen interface.
This solution allows hard disk drive and system manufacturers to reliably and cost-effectively transition from parallel interfaces to advanced serial interfaces, which will dramatically increase the data throughput between disk drives and motherboards in PCs, laptops, consumer electronic devices and high-end corporate storage applications.
"Agere is focused on addressing the growing storage area networking market through our broad serdes portfolio", said Necip Sayiner, Vice President of Agere's Networking ASIC business.
"We are pleased that our solutions are enabling Pacific Digital to quickly address the market opportunity for the entry and mid-level storage system market".
Pacific Digital's line of RaidStaQ and DiscStaQ ADMA/Ultra ATA PCI host adapters substantially enhances the performance of ATA disk drives.
The new PCI-X to Serial ATA 2.0 host bus adapter uses Pacific Digital's new embedded hardware RAID technology in a single ASIC.
This technology incorporates and substantially improves Pacific Digital's revolutionary Automatic DMA (ADMA) technology and facilitates the use of cost-effective SATA drives in performance-sensitive enterprise platforms.
Pacific Digital's ADMA technology increases the throughput and data integrity of systems that use ATA drives and dramatically improves the price/performance of these systems, when compared with SCSI-based configurations of similar capacity.
These attributes are essential requirements within the server and networking community.
This translates into a higher performance and better value experience for high-end system builders, integrators and end users when upgrading or installing new ATA devices.
Automatic DMA was specifically designed to work with ATA command-queuing hard drives.
The new technology supports Serial ATA II at 3Gbit/s transfer rate, SATA-1/ATA-6 command queuing as well as first-party DMA with up to 256 command queuing tags to allow for future extensions to the SATA standard.
Pacific Digital is working closely with top hard drive manufacturers to ensure easy transition to the new standard in high performance ATA drives.
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