QLogic announces cost-effective, high-performance Ultra ATA controller chip with ATAPI.

COSTA MESA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 28, 1997--QLogic (NASDAQ:QLGC) on Tuesday announces the ATEC378, the latest addition to their widely used Triple Embedded Controller family of single-chip hard disk drive controllers.

The ATEC378 supports the Ultra ATA and ATAPI-4 (IDE) standard interface and now brings all the advantages of QLogic's leading-edge headerless hard disk controller (HDC) technology to hard disk drives (HDD) for PC applications. The product is targeted at both fixed and removable HDD manufacturers, and provides a cost-effective, high-performance controller solution for magneto resistive (MR) head HDD designs.

The ATEC378 is a format-compatible, enhanced, follow-on product to the ATEC336 Triple Embedded IDE Controller. In addition, the ATEC378 is largely firmware compatible with QLogic's leading high-performance TEC376 and TEC386 SCSI controllers and provides exact disk format and ECC compatibility.

"Because of the format compatibility between the TEC376 and the ATEC378, the removable media HDD manufacturer can offer both SCSI and ATA (IDE) products with complete media interchangeability between models," said Dave Tovey, vice president and general manager of QLogic's Peripheral Products group. "And because most of the firmware is compatible between the two devices, code development time and risk are substantially reduced."

Host ATA Bus

The ATEC378 combines a state-of-the-art disk formatter, a buffer controller and a host ATA bus processor controller. Conforming to ANSI ATA-2, ATA-3, Ultra ATA and ATAPI-4 standards, the product exceeds all ATA and ATA-2 bus specifications for advanced PIO timing modes 3 and 4, and meets the specifications for multiword DMA timing modes 1, 2 and 3. With host ATA bus data transfer rates up to 16.6 Mbytes/sec PIO and 33 Mbytes/sec DMA, the product can transfer data at up to double the speed of current production ATA HDDs. ATAPI support is provided for packet commands to support removable media applications.

Disk Formatter

The ATEC378 provides an 8-bit parallel NRZ disk interface that supports disk data rates of up to 20 Mbytes/sec. To provide ECC flexibility and allow the designer to optimize the HDD design for media error density, the ATEC378 also features enhanced, programmable Reed Solomon, selectable 144-bit or 192-bit ECC data field protection with on-the-fly, quadruple-burst error correction and error logging. Use of a media resident Logical Block Address further ensures data integrity at both media and data buffer levels.

Packaging, Pricing and Availability

The ATEC378 is available in a 128-pin plastic quad flat package (PQFP), and sells for less than $9 in large OEM quantities. Samples will be available in March 1997 and production volume is scheduled for May 1997.

About QLogic

QLogic Corp., with headquarters in Costa Mesa, is a leading designer and supplier of semiconductor and board-level I/O products. The company's products provide high-performance connections between a computer and its attached peripherals. Historically, QLogic has targeted the high-performance sector of the I/O market, focusing on the SCSI standard. The company's I/O expertise extends to emerging standards, including Fibre Channel, which are currently experiencing early industry acceptance.

For more information about QLogic and its product lines, contact QLogic Corp., 3545 Harbor Blvd., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626; telephone: sales 800/662-4471, corporate 714/438-2200; fax: [phone]; home page http://www.qlc.com . -0-

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