embWiSe announces Linux CE-ATA Software Stack

Chennai, India – February 3, 2006 embWiSe Technologies, a start-up in Chennai, India has announced the release of the MMC-CE-ATA software stack under Linux.

CE-ATA (Consumer Electronics AT-Attachment) is the standard small form factor storage specification jointly announced by Intel, Toshiba, Hitachi, Seagate and Marvell. (http://www.ce-ata.org)  The CE-ATA is based on the MMC electrical interface, also using an optimized subset of the ATA command set to address storage requirements in Handheld and Consumer Electronics devices.

With more and more audio/video content becoming available in the CE devices, usage of small form factor Hard Drives with large capacity will become imminent in these embedded devices, replacing the existing devices based on Flash memory technology. The CE-ATA is set to become the defacto standard to address this requirement – ensuring optimal power management in mobile devices, scalability for future usage models and compatibility between the Host and Storage devices.

embWiSe becomes  the first independent software vendor in the world to be offering an CE-ATA stack under LinuxOS.

Features of the CE-ATA stack:

• Supported on Linux 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels and portable across different Embedded Real Time Operating Systems.
• Standards Compliance :

• MMC Specification v3.x, v4.x
• CE-ATA Digital Protocol Revision 1.0/1.1

• Supports all of the bus MMC bus modes (1 bit, 4bit & 8-bit)
• Tested for MMC4.0 compliant MMCPlus and MMCMobile cards
• Multiple Host controller and Slot Support.
• Platform Independence:

• OS Independent Architecture wrapped around a thin OS layer
• Processor Independent Stack and Drivers

• Developed in ANSI C

The CE-ATA stack design architecture assists all of the parties involved (storage controller silicon vendors, peripheral card vendors, hard driver vendors, device OEMs and ODMs) in developing solutions independently, minimizing costs and mitigating the risks involved in developing the Bus Driver architecture, through code re-use. The stack enables addition of future version of MMC/CE-ATA card support to embedded devices in with minimal effort and time.

embWiSe is a member of the CE-ATA Consortium.

Download the CE-ATA stack flyer here.

For more information contact embWiSe at: info@embwise.com .