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Serial ATA chip puts four channels on PCI

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Sep 8, 2004

A new four-port serial ATA interface allows designers to access the scalability, performance, and price benefits of the new serial interface standard for storage devices of all types.

A new four-port serial ATA interface allows designers to access the scalability, performance, and price benefits of the new serial interface standard for storage devices of all types, from PC hard disks to RAID and NAS applications.

The Silicon Image SATALink SiI 3114 from Sequoia is a single-chip, SATA 1.0 compliant, four-port interface capable of linking a PCI motherboard, addon card or backplane with to up to four serial ATA storage devices.

The IC integrates a 32bit 33/66MHz PCI 2.3 compliant PCI interface as well as the internal bus interfaces, DMA engines, buffering and link and PHY transport layers required to interface to up to four serial ATA storage peripherals.

An interface to up to 4Mbyte external Flash or EEPROM is also integrated on-chip.

Available in a 176-pin, 0.4mm pitch TQFP package measuring 20 x 20mm, the SiI 3114 is hot plug capable, has selectable transmit drive strength for backplane applications, and supports spread spectrum clocking to reduce EMI.

Power management features include 1.8V core voltage and 3.3V I/O with 5V tolerance, as well as ACPI PCIbus power management, version 1.1.

Software support includes drivers for Windows, Linux and Novell Netware operating systems for RAID and non-RAID operations.

Silicon Image RAID management software is also available, which supports RAID 0 striping, RAID 1 mirroring and RAID 1+0 mirrored stripe modes.

A configuration utility, flash utility and base BIOS are also included.

Serial ATA is a high-performance, scalable interface suitable for PCs, high capacity servers, workstations and storage systems featuring Serial ATA peripherals.

Serial ATA technology delivers 1st-generation speeds of 1.5Gbit/s to each drive within a disk drive array, and is software compatible with parallel ATA as well as OS transparent.

As a point-to-point connection serial ATA enables easier configuration and design and allows OEMs to use common disk technologies across multiple segments, to deliver lower cost, higher performance and easier configuration for end-users of PCs, servers, RAID systems and network attached storage.

Equipment that will benefit from the SiI 3114's arrival includes PCs and servers, host bus adapters, RAID subsystems and embedded applications requiring connection of four or more serial ATA devices to a motherboard or addon card.

Cascading SiI 3114s allows more than four serial ATA storage peripherals to be connected to a PCIbus.

The Silicon Image SiI 3114 starter kit also supports designers using the new device.

The kit includes hardware, software and documentation to quickly build interfaces for serial ATA-compliant storage peripherals.