The OXUF924DSa and DSb from Oxford Semiconductor provide external storage designers with a bridge between SATA disks and USB2.0, FireWire400, FireWire800 and External SATA ports. These integrated bridge chips enable drive manufacturers to introduce PC and Mac compatible combination products that benefit from a low component count and optimised data throughput.
Backed by an industry-proven 1.5GHz embedded SERDES, the bridge chips’ dual SATA II compliant core and Phy support a data transmission rate of up to 150Mbps. Hardware accelerated RAID functionality is offered by the chips, comprising disk striping, mirroring and spanning. Alternatively, one SATA port can be configured as a host-facing interface for eSATA to SATA connections.
Both FireWire interface standards are supported by the bridge chips: FireWire400 by the OXUF924DSa and FireWire800 by the OXUF924DSb. The chips’ embedded IEEE1394 Phy interface and link layer operates at up to 400Mbps and 800Mbps respectively, while hardware acceleration optimises reads, writes and small data block transfers.
The chips’ 480Mbps USB2.0 Link and Phy ensure fast read and write transfers and maximum possible host performance. The interface is backwards compatible with USB1.1 and supported by an integral 18Kbyte data cache.
These dual SATA bridge chips provide developers with significant opportunities for product differentiation through their being ARM7 based, integrating 8Kb of closely-coupled RAM, and having 1Mb external flash interface and 12 GPIOs. A 12Mbps embedded UART is provided for firmware code development and debug, while field upgrades are also simple to implement via the chips’ FireWire or USB ports.