EmbWise Technologies is shipping a Linux driver and stack for tiny hard drives based on the MMC (multimedia memory card) form factor. The company's MMC-CE-ATA stack supports the CE-ATA (consumer electronics AT-attachment) standard jointly promoted by Intel, Toshiba, Hitach, Seagate, and Marvell. It targets device makers and controller silicon vendors.

The CE-ATA standard combines the MMC electrical interface, and a subset of the ATA command set. Embwise is a member of the CE-ATA Consortium that maintains the standard, and says it expects CE-ATA drives to replace Flash-based storage in devices with audio-visual capabilities.

EmbWise claims the following features for its MMC-CE-ATA stack:

• Standards-compliant
  • MMC Specification v3.x, v4.x
  • CE-ATA Digital Protocol Revision 1.0/1.1
• Supports all MMC bus modes (1 bit, 4bit & 8-bit)
• Tested for MMC4.0 compliant MMCPlus and MMCMobile cards
• Multiple Host controller and Slot Support
• Platform Independence
  • Processor-independent stack and drivers
  • Developed in ANSI C
  • OS-independent architecture wrapped around a thin OS layer
    • Supports Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels
    • Portable to other embedded RTOSes (real-time OSes)

Additionally, EmbWise says its MMC-CE-ATA stack will help controller silicon vendors and device designers track future versions of the MMC/CE-ATA standard.

EmbWise is based in Chenai, India, and specializes in SDIO and MMC interface software. It claims to be the first ISV (independent software vendor) to offer a CE-ATA stack for Linux, although Arasan released a Linux-based CE-ATA host controller hardware development kit last October.

 
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