Soft Mixed Signal Corporation Announces Serial ATA (SATA) PHY IP

SATA 1.5Gbps/3.0Gbps PHY IP Compliant to Serial ATA 1.0a and Serial ATA II Specification

Santa Clara, Calif. – Monday, October 25, 2004 – Soft Mixed Signal Corporation, today announced availability of its scalable, low-power Serial ATA (SATA) PHY IP compliant with SATA 1.5Gbps Gen1 and SATA 3.0Gbps Gen2 requirements. It also embodies the electrical specification compliance to Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and SAS handshake for Out Of Band (OOB) signaling.
 
Serial ATA is an evolutionary storage interface standard designed to replace the existing Parallel ATA storage interface.  SATA allows for significantly improved performance and reliability for data transfer in a low-cost, low-power solution.
 
SMS SATA PHY IP compliant with SATA Gen-1  & Gen-2 specifications. The 0.18µm PHY (physical layer which includes an integrated digital Out of Band (OOB) processor, K28.5 COMMA detector and fully integrated clock synthesis) can be intelligently scaled to support power-efficient multi-port/lane applications.   SMS SATA PHY Implementations for 0.13µm processes are also being readied. SMS SATA interoperates with multiple Link & Transport Layer IP Blocks available from IP Vendors.
 
SMS SATA IP provides a high-performance fully integrated solution with very small area & power when integrating SATA technology into new or upgraded SOC applications.
 
"Serial ATA technology is poised to become a dominant storage technology in systems ranging from the desktop to the enterprise," according to published industry analysis reports. “In addition to PC and enterprise markets, Consumer applications are strong potential applications for Serial ATA from Set-top boxes to Digital Video Recorders”, said Omer Kal, CEO, Soft Mixed Signal Corporation. “High value PHY IP cores like SMS SATA IP enable PC and Consumer Electronics applications a painless transition to Serial ATA”

About Soft Mixed Signal Corporation  
Founded in 1995, Soft Mixed Signal Corporation (SMS) is a leading semiconductor intellectual property company offering innovative solutions for LAN, WAN and high-speed connectivity markets. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, SMS develops and offers system level PHY (Physical Layer) / Transceiver Semiconductor IC solutions for LAN, WAN, SAN/Connectivity markets utilizing proprietary mixed signal and digital signal processing (DSP) technologies These include LAN: Fast (100Base-T), Gigabit (Fiber or Copper), 10Gigabit Ethernet; WAN: SONET (OC-3, OC-12, OC-48); SAN/Connectivity: Fiber-Channel, PCI-Express, USB2.0, NPFI/SPI 4.2 PHY.
Soft Mixed Signal Corporation is also a member of the newly formed Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO), created by the members of the Serial ATA II Working Group, is the international organization that owns and manages Serial ATA specifications as open-industry standards. The non-profit organization defines and implements Serial ATA storage specifications as the industry's storage needs evolve. Additional information about the SATA-IO is available at http://www.sata-io.org.
Soft Mixed Signal Corporation can be reached on the Internet at www.softmixedsignal.com.