Oxford Semiconductor Announced Two New ARM7 Based Storage Controller ICs

Oxford Semiconductor announced two new ARM7 based storage controller ICs. Able to bridge between SATA hard disk drives and eSATA, FireWire800, FireWire400 and USB2.0 interfaces, these latest storage controllers are the first with a universal interface to offer full software control of the eSATA data path. This added connectivity option gives designers the means to introduce custom eSATA functionality, such as button-push back up, and to launch external storage products assuring portability of data between current and future computer platforms.

The OXUF934DSb provides the complete universal interface. For applications not requiring the services of FireWire800, there is the lower cost OXUF934DSa. Windows® and Mac® OS compatible host drivers are included for button notification and GPIO control applications. To simplify manufacturing and in-field upgrades, firmware can be programmed via the FireWire or USB ports.

Integrating dual SATA cores and PHYs, the controllers are designed to deliver maximum performance with minimum latency, with interface speeds of 3Gbps for SATA II external storage and 1.5Gbps for backwards compatibility with SATA I external storage. With one of the SATA cores configurable as either a host or device port it can be used to create either an eSATA interface or a host interface to a second hard disk. In dual SATA host mode the controllers will provide disk striping (RAID 0) and disk spanning functionality, alternatively in eSATA mode a 2-disk RAID 0 configuration is readily achieved using an external port multiplier.

The controller’s embedded USB2.0 PHY supports both full and high speed operating modes, uses bulk-only transport Mass Storage Class device protocol, and is backwards compatible with USB1.1. Its fast read and write transfers ensure that the maximum possible host performance is maintained. The use of hardware acceleration for small data block sizes ensures the chip’s IEEE1394 PHY and link layer provides industry leading FireWire connectivity performance.