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Storage controller provides fast feed to SATA II

RAID functions included in IC to route data to external discs

26th July 2007 – The latest IC in Oxford Semiconductor’s 93X family of storage controllers provides a bridging function from USB2.0 and eSATA ports to the SATA II disk interface. Oxford designed the OXU931DS to support high performance external storage connectivity for all current and emerging PC and Mac platforms. With one of the chip’s two integrated SATA cores and PHYs configurable as either a host or a device port, the controller offers disc enclosure designers the option of either the 3Gbps eSATA interface or an interface to a second SATA hard disk.
In its dual SATA disk mode, the OXU931DS supports both disk striping (RAID 0) and disk spanning for larger storage capacity applications, via the standard USB2.0 interface. Based on an ARM7 core, the controller is offers full software control of the eSATA data path. This allows designers of external storage products to add features such as button-push back-up. The USB interface handles full and high speed modes, employs bulk-only transport Mass Storage Class device protocol and is backwards compatible with USB1.1. The OXU931DS storage controller comes complete with Windows and Mac OS compatible drivers for standard storage and button notification applications and for control of the chip’s 12 GPIOs.