Chip Serves As Wide LVD SCSI Enclosure Manager

Housed in a single, 160-pin PQFP, the highly integrated VSC205 chip is said to be the industry’s first fully compliant wide LVD SCSI enclosure management controller. It provides support for SCSI Enclosure Services (SES), SCSI Accessed Fault Tolerant Enclosure (SAF-TE), and Intelligent Platform Management Initiative (IPMI) that allows storage system diagnostics. Supporting both target and initiator modes of operation over an 8- or 16-bit SCSI bus, the controller is suited for use in SCSI JBODs, RAID subsystems, and servers with integrated storage for monitoring system operation. Made using 3.3V technology with 5V tolerant I/O, VSC205 integrates a wide SCSI controller, 27 universal LVD transceivers, a high-performance RISC engine, three master/slave mode two-wire serial interfaces, a general-purpose UART, a 32-bit timer, general-purpose I/O, 16 Kbytes of SRAM, an external memory interface, and a Serial-ICE interface for firmware debugging and development. A companion device, SSC050 two-wire backplane controller, integrates most of the enclosure management-related logic found in storage subsystems.