CE-ATA: Tiny Hard-Disk Standard

April 28, 2005

Today's compact hard drives have custom interfaces. Integrated drive electronics (IDE) and other such interfaces simply have too many pins to be practical. As for serial ATA, it's too new and a bit costly in terms of power and hardware. The up-a

William G. Wong

The up-and-coming alternative, CE-ATA, is under development by companies from the CE-ATA Work Group. These companies include Intel, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Marvell Semiconductor Inc., Seagate Technology, and Toshiba America Information Systems, as well as the MultiMedia Card Association (MMCA).

CE-ATA uses the same electrical interface as the MultiMedia Card (MMC), with modifications to handle a functional subset of the Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) command set. This permits existing microprocessors with MMC interfaces to readily handle CE-ATA devices, though they will require a new CE-ATA device driver. In the future, microprocessors may have two MMC interfaces, with each supporting only one device.

The CE-ATA 1.0 specification will be finalized soon. Initial products are likely to arrive in 2005.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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