Storage technology has made tremendous progress in the last decade. The rapid advances and ready availability of small form factor hard disk drive (HDD) and flash storage devices is driving the explosion of portable devices in the market place. Actel offers storage solutions that cover most of the hard drives and flash storage controllers for the portable market. As the storage device market prolifererates, with ever changing protocols and interface standards, design teams are challenged to shrink design cycle times and yet create newer competing portable devices with additional features. With the availability of IGLOO, an ultra-low power FPGA family from Actel that has a device density of up to 3 million gates, it's possible to implement a variety of storage functions without having to redesign the whole system based on changing storage interfaces requirements.

Actel offers controllers for popular storage interface standards such as SD, SDIO, microSD, MMC, and CE-ATA that are optimized for low power, suitable for the portable market. These storage controllers support storage device extension to leading application processors used in handheld devices, from companies such as Marvell and Freescale. In situations where application processor support is limited to a small number for peripherals, IGLOO helps in expanding the capabilities of the application processor by providing the right controllers and interfaces on the reprogrammable IGLOO FPGA.

Storage devices are becoming an integral part of portable electronic devices. Handheld devices will continue to use storage devices of increasing capacities in the future. The storage devices are broadly classified as 1) hard disk drives (HDD) and 2) flash storage devices.

Flash

Flash storage devices are widely used today and are competing in capacity with HDD-based microdrives. The flash devices come in many different forms, supporting multiple protocols and standards. Actel offers several CompanionCore IP cores that can readily be used in your design.

• Secure Digital (SD)
  SD is the latest flash memory card format developed by a collaboration of the leading flash manufacturers. It is designed for use in portable devices, including GPS devices, digital cameras, PDAs, and cell phones.
  
  
• CompactFlash (CF)
  CF is a very small removable mass storage device for portable devices, first introduced by SanDisk. CompactFlash Interface provides TrueIDE functionality compatible with ATA/ATAPI-4 and also provides complete PCMCIA-ATA functionality and compatibility. These are mostly used in digital cameras and the Type II CF slot can be used for microdrives in portable devices.
  
  
  
• NAND Flash
  NAND flash memory technology is used in the removable storage devices such as CompactFlash and USB drives. It allows greater storage densities and lower costs due to its faster erase and write times and a smaller chip area per cell than the NOR Flash. It finds itself largely in portable audio and video players, PDAs, digital cameras, and video recorders.
  
  
  

Hard Disk Drives

HDDs are used in devices that require very high storage capacities, such as video recorders and camcorders. The controllers are also used in video/audio playback equipment that uses CD or DVD.

• Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA)
  Storage devices such as hard disks and CD/DVD drives interface to the computing/consumer electronic device through a standard called ATA. With the introduction of Serial ATA, the original standard is now called Parallel ATA (PATA). These are used in portable computers, portable drives, and other devices.
  
  
  
• Consumer Electronics-ATA (CE-ATA)
  CE-ATA is the interface standard that was derived from MMC with the addition of ATA commands, small form factor, and power-conscious designs used in the latest consumer electronic devices—portable media players, cell phones, and other handheld and gaming devices.
  
  
  

Storage Solution for Marvell's PXA 300/310 Handheld Platform

This solution from Actel and Arasan Chip Systems demonstrates an IGLOO device working as an SD/SDIO/microSD/CE-ATA interface to Marvell's latest PXA3XX series of processors. The daughter card plugs into the expansion connector of the PXA300/310 handheld platform development kit from Marvell and contains SD/MMC, microSD, and CE-ATA connectors.
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Storage Solution for iWave's iW-Rainbow-G3 Platform

The iW-Rainbow-G3 solution from iWave Systems is based on Freescale's i.MX27 processor and the implementation of the CE-ATA interface controller on Actel's ProASIC3 device (replaceable by an IGLOO flash-based FPGA). The storage interface and controllers can be programmed into the Actel FPGA, which extends the i.MX27 support for additional storage peripherals such as SD/MMC and CE-ATA. The platform supports wireless streaming and media codec, and contains several security features. » Learn More

Storage Solution for Marvell's PXA270

This solution includes a demo board, designed in collaboration with Palmchip, to plug on the PXA270 development kit. The board contains Actel's ProASIC3 device (replaceable by an IGLOO flash-based FPGA) that can embed the controllers for multiple storage devices, such as ATA, CE-ATA, CF, and SD/MMC, in addition to PCMCIA and Mini-PCI connectors. The development kit comes with the Windows CE operating system. » Learn More

 

Demonstration platforms are available for storage solutions. For a FREE demo or evaluation, please contact your local Actel Sales representative.