Storage Controller with SATA-eSATA-FireWire-USB Bridging Capability - OXUF934DSb, OXUF934DSa - Oxford Semiconductor

Oxford Semiconductor Inc., announced the OXUF934DSb and OXUF934DSa, new ARM7 based storage controller chips, which able to bridge between SATA hard disk drives and eSATA, FireWire800, FireWire400 and USB2.0 interfaces. The OXUF934DSb provides the complete interfacing capability. The OXUF934DSa is the lower cost version, for applications not requiring the services of FireWire800.

OXUF934DSb and OXUF934DSa Storage Controller with SATA-eSATA-FireWire-USB Bridging Capability

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.

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.

Further reading: Oxford Semiconductor - Storage Controller with SATA-eSATA-FireWire-USB Bridging Capability