| Group bakes interface for tiny hard drives |
Sep. 21, 2004
Handheld and portable consumer gadgets may soon have their own storage interface, thanks to a new standard being concocted by Toshiba, Hitachi, Seagate, Marvell, and Intel. The group's proposed CE-ATA (consumer electronics AT-attachment) standard will address the interface requirements of small form-factor drives used in consumer devices such as media players, GPSes, and even mobile phones -- devices which are currently experiencing explosive growth. CE-ATA will address issues of low pin count, small size, low voltage, power efficiency, and cost effectiveness.
 "No disk drive interface exists today that is tailored to the needs of the handheld and CE market segments, so disk drives have had to make do with other interface alternatives that are complex and cumbersome or simply ill-suited to meet the needs of disk drives in space and power constrained tiny handhelds," explained Knut Grimsrud, Intel's CE-ATA senior principal engineer. "With the explosive growth of portable consumer devices, the CE-ATA initiative attends to a tremendous need for an efficient small form-factor disk drive interface."
One of the most common interfaces used for small form-factor disk drives today is usually referred to as "CF+," Grimsrud says, which is effectively a combination of CF (CompactFlash) and parallel ATA. "All the reasons for transitioning parallel ATA to Serial ATA in the mainstream desktop segment apply to an even greater degree in the handheld segments where space and power constraints as well as cost effectiveness are even more critical," he explains.
"Although Serial ATA is an ideal solution for mainstream computing, Serial ATA is not an optimal interface for the small form-factor handheld gadget application as it was designed with the mainstream desktop drive requirements in mind," Grimsrud continues. "Those requirements are not the same as those for the handheld segment. The baseline SATA performance is 150MB/s, while the actual bandwidth requirements for current small form-factor disk drives is typically on the order of 5MB/s."
In short, because SATA's performance is overkill for handheld applications, it is not as power efficient as what is desired in such applications, and it also results in undue design and integration burden that yields little corresponding offsetting benefit. For example, needlessly dealing with 1.5Gbps signals (and the associated transceivers) in handheld gadgets results in excess cost, design complexity, power consumption, and electromagnetic issues.
The CE-ATA standard is expected to benefit disk drive suppliers, silicon providers, product integrators, and consumers, the group says. Additionally, it is anticipated that the new standard will advance the use of disk drives in consumer devices and enable the creation of new types of products that can take advantage of a new generation of small form-factor disk drives.
The CE-ATA initiative is organized and operated in a manner similar to that of Serial ATA (SATA), Grimsrud says. CE-ATA is being developed independently from SATA due to the differing requirements between handheld/portable CE applications (which require modest transfer rates at maximum power efficiency) and those of mainstream computing (which require high performance).
Although there are various other organizations and forums which could have developed the standard, Grimsrud says the founders of the CE-ATA initiative believe that "a small agile team of some of the most prominent and capable companies with a vested interest in the success of the initiative can often get the task done more quickly and efficiently than other forums can." Of the founders, the three most prominent and capable small form-factor disk drive companies are represented as well as a silicon supplier to the small form-factor disk drive industry, he notes. "We expect to work closely with other key industry players in this market segment as well in order to ensure the solution is well tailored to the unique needs of this market segment," he adds.
"Intel has had extensive experience in driving these kinds of initiatives and we have experience in working very well with the founder companies on previous efforts," says Grimsrud.
At this point, details as to CE-ATA's possible connector, pin assignment, and signal characteristics have not been made public. The specification is scheduled to be completed in the first half of 2005, with the first end products supporting CE-ATA becoming available several months thereafter.
Although the CE-ATA initiative has not officially announced a website, keep an eye on CE-ATA.org, which has been registered in the name of Knut Grimsrud, using an Intel email address.
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