Denali and TaraCom Announce Comprehensive Solutions for 3.0 Gb/s SATA

IP Vendors Team to Deliver Digital Controller IP, PHY IP, and Verification IP

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 23, 2005 -- Denali Software, Inc. and TaraCom Integrated Products Inc., a leading provider of SerDes technology, today announced availability of comprehensive intellectual property (IP) solutions for Serial ATA (SATA) design, verification, and deployment.

The integrated solution provides developers with Denali's Databahn™ design IP for controlling SATA devices, TaraCom's TRC3002 SATA physical layer (PHY) IP, and Denali's PureSpec™ verification IP for ensuring compliance, interoperability and system performance.

Serial ATA is quickly replacing parallel ATA in hard disks in desktop and mobile PCs. The SATA hard drive connector is smaller than the equivalent parallel connector, and enables data transfer rates of 1.5Gb/s, with next-generation speed increases of 3Gb/s and beyond. Design teams are now using IP from Denali and TaraCom as building blocks for rapidly deploying high-quality SATA designs for next-generation electronics products.

"Design teams are increasingly looking for best-in-class IP solutions for deploying complex interface standards such as SATA," says David Lin, vice president at Denali. "By working with TaraCom, we will be providing the additional value of a highly integrated solution that spans all the way from the PHY to the system interface, including system-level verification. This is exactly what customers need to achieve a high-quality design under tremendous time-to-market pressures."

"Our customers view this integrated SATA solution as a critical piece of the puzzle for their chip designs," adds TaraCom Chief Executive Officer Farhad Haghighi. "By joining forces on the digital controller, PHY and verification flow, we're able to offer customers a lot of value in terms of performance and overall design quality. The integrated flow also enables us to provide the configurability needed to address specific markets and applications."

About Denali Databahn SATA Controller IP Products
Denali's Databahn SATA core supports Serial ATA 1.0a at 1.5Gb/s and 3Gb/s, and other optional features such as Native Command Queuing (NCQ). An optionally integrated Databahn double data rate (DDR) memory controller core keeps SATA data off the system busses, lowering CPU overhead. Databahn SATA also offers a simple interface to the Direct Memory Access (DMA) interface using the Intel advanced host controller interface (AHCI) specification, and a programmed I/O (PIO) mode for legacy applications and AT Attachment Packet Interface (ATAPI). The SATA IP core is integrated to the TaraCom SATA PHY IP products. Other features are configurable and programmable to offer the system architect extensive flexibility for optimal performance for a particular application.

For more information about Denali's Databahn SATA IP, visit Denali online at http://www.denali.com/databahn.

About TaraCom SATA PHY Products
TaraCom's TRC3002 SATA PHY product provides a complete physical layer of the SATA standards, with an optimized interface to the Denali Databahn SATA controller IP. The TRC3002 enables data transfer rates of 150 MB and 300 MB, uses DDR transmission for sending and receiving data. Additional features include, slumber and partial power saving modes, programmable out-of-band signaling, far-end and near-end loopback modes, and hot plug support. It also provides an on-chip multi pattern generator, a PRBS error checker to support BIST, a programmable receive equalization and adjustable output pre-emphasis.

For more complete information about TaraCom SATA PHY products, visit TaraCom online at: http://www.taracom.net.

About Denali PureSpec Verification IP for SATA
PureSpec for SATA is a comprehensive solution for verifying functionality, compliance, and interoperability of all Serial ATA speeds and designs at the pre-silicon stage of chip or IP core development. PureSpec verification IP includes a configurable bus functional model (BFM), protocol monitor, and complete assertion library for all SATA components in the topology, including the host and one or more SATA devices.

Composite configurations by port and function are also supported. PureSpec additionally provides a sophisticated data generation engine to help drive defined, pseudo-random bus traffic at all layers. Injected errors and error conditions are flagged and recovered according to SATA specifications. The highly integrated nature of PureSpec for SATA's model behavior and data generation engine applies a sophisticated context-sensitive data generation approach to test plan execution. This enables direct translation from test plan definition to implementation, accelerating the verification task and overall verification productivity. A cumulative coverage database capability ensures that the overall test plan sufficiently exercises the design.

For more information about Denali's PureSpec verification IP products, visit Denali online at http://www.denali.com/purespec.

About Denali
Denali Software Inc. is the world's leading provider of EDA tools and Intellectual Property (IP) solutions for chip interface design, integration and verification. Its Databahn™ Design IP products offer fully configurable design cores for complex interfaces such as Serial ATA and DDR-based memory systems. Denali's PureSpec™ Verification IP product supports all complex interfaces, including PCI Express, Advanced Switching Interconnect (ASI), USB, Ethernet and Serial ATA. More than 400 companies worldwide use Denali's tools, technology, and services to design and verify complex chip interfaces for communication, consumer, and computer products. For more information, visit Denali at http://www.denali.com. Telephone: (650) 461-7200. 

About TaraCom
TaraCom Integrated Products Inc. is a privately held fabless semiconductor company specializing in innovative high speed mixed signal IC products. The company is focused in developing innovative technologies to design and market high speed, high performance SerDes (Serializer, Deserializer), physical interface ASSP and IP core products using sub-micron CMOS process. The company's high performance products offer industry's highest jitter tolerance and most comprehensive features to address the requirements of LAN/MAN/WAN/SAN markets with a wide variety of applications. Target applications include high speed backplanes, 10G and 40G Ethernet, Fiber Channel, for the SAN (Storage Area Networks) and NAS (Network Attached Storage) storage markets as well as the recently evolving SATA (serial ATA), SAS (serial SCSI), PCI Express and HyperTransport applications for internal serial data communications in PCs, servers and DAS (Direct Access Storage). For more information, visit TaraCom at http://www.taracom.net. Telephone: (408) 530-8272. 

The Denali logo, Denali, and Databahn, PureSpec, MMAV and SOMA are trademarks of Denali Software Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.