A technical overview of the CE-ATA storage interface

Mohamed A. Salem, Mentor Graphics
(03/20/2006 9:00 AM EST), EE Times
 
Digital content is driving our society forward. Everywhere you turn there’s a new device with greater capacity ready to consume even more precious storage space. The digital content explosion is rapidly consuming available hard-disk drive (HDD) space and creating a critical storage challenge.

With these dynamics in place, the consumer electronics advanced technology attachment (CE-ATA) interface is quickly emerging as the new storage standard — for good reason. Not only does CE-ATA specifically address the challenges of portable digital storage, but it does so with an intelligent combination of both proven and newly created storage technologies.

CE-ATA is the storage industry’s response to providing an optimized standard interface for small form factor (SFF) storage solutions in handheld, portable, and consumer electronics applications.

This article presents an overview of this state-of-the-art technology and goes underneath the hood of this promising new storage standard. We’ll also look at the various layers of the protocol used for communication between the host and a SFF storage device.

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