Arasan Chip Systems says it will bring its CE-ATA products to the industry's first CE-ATA Plugfest in Milpitas, CA this week. The CE-ATA (consumer electronics AT-attachment) standard addresses the interface requirements of tiny drives used in consumer devices such as media players, GPSes, and mobile phones.

The CE-ATA Plugfest is intended to bring market leaders in the CE-ATA industry together to ensure proper inter-operation among their respective products, according to Arasan.

CE-ATA HDK (Click image to enlarge)

At this week's CE-ATA Plugfest, Arasan will showcase its CE-ATA Host IP core and Linux CE-ATA stack, which were prototyped on an FPGA board, and are offered as a CE-ATA Host Hardware Development Kit (HDK) that also bundles a proprietary Windows CE driver. The board can be plugged into any x86 PC, and used for CE-ATA development and testing, Arasan says.

The CE-ATA HDK is already in use by several CE-ATA hard drive vendors, according to the company.

CE-ATA Host IP core block diagram
(Click image for larger view)
Arasan says its CE-ATA Host Controller IP conforms to CE-ATA Digital Protocol revision 1.0, with support for CE-ATA Digital Protocol commands (CMD39 / CMD60 / CMD61). In addition to CE-ATA, the core supports Flash-based storage cards, and provides support for current SD, SDIO, and MMC 4.x card standards.

CE-ATA was jointly announced in September 2004 by Toshiba, Hitachi, Seagate, Marvell, and Intel. The interface provides reduced pin count, better power utilization, voltages tailored to battery-based applications, and more efficient command protocol, according to Arasan. Further details on CE-ATA are available on the CE-ATA website.

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