SST INTRODUCES STAND-ALONE ATA FLASH DISK CONTROLLER.

SST brings mass-storage capability to a whole new series of applications by offering its flash-based ATA Flash Disk Controller as a stand-alone product. The ATA Flash Disk Controller is the "heart" of SST's successful ATA-compatible mass storage products. The ATA Flash Disk Controller allows designers to create their own flash memory-based on-board mass data storage solutions for customer specific applications.

Supporting up to 640 MBytes of memory capacity, SST's ATA Flash Disk Controller is ideal for most embedded applications, such as thin-client systems, digital cameras, MP3 players and other digital consumer products requiring reliable and small footprint mass data storage. The controller can be easily integrated into a customer's processor board for space savings or be combined with flash media devices to create any specialty embedded memory module.

SST's ATA Flash Disk Controller can recognize up to five external flash memory devices, up to 1 Gigabit density each, to create as large as a 640 MByte flash drive. The controller manages the interface between the industry standard ATA bus and flash media, eliminating the complexities and associated overhead of writing specialized firmware to support functions such as bad-block management, error correction and flash media wear leveling, which are required in order to achieve reliable data storage operation.

The controller's internal flash memory is factory preprogrammed with Embedded Flash File System firmware, which recognizes the external flash media upon power-up and performs all the necessary "handshaking" routines for media support. SST's ATA Flash Disk Controller was developed using SST's proprietary SuperFlash embedded memory technology. The embedded flash allows easy firmware modifications to integrate unique customer features.

"A major trend in the portable and handheld electronics market continues to be the desire to make devices smaller yet still achieve higher functionality," said Samuel Nakhimovsky, product marketing manager, subsystem products, SST. "Because of this trend, traditional means of mass data storage, such as hard disk drives and optical disks, are often too large and power-hungry to support the needs of next generation electronic devices. Flash, as a stand-alone medium is becoming the technology of choice for these embedded applications. We decided to add the ATA Flash Disk Controller to our array of ATA-Disk Chips and Modules to give embedded designers a number of options for mass data storage."

SST's new ATA Flash Disk Controller supports the standard ATA/IDE interface up to PIO Mode-4, with sustained write and read speed of up to 1.4 MByte/sec and 4.0 MByte/sec respectively. In addition, the controller includes a Write Protect Pin, which offers hardware protection for the data stored on the flash media from any unintentional data overwrites, such as those commonly caused by system viruses. For additional security, the ATA Flash Disk Controller comes factory-programmed with a 20-byte unique serial identification number to prevent unauthorized duplication by allowing encryption of user data.

The ATA Controller is available now in a 14 mm x 14 mm 100-pin TQFP package in both commercial and industrial temperature grades, and is priced at $5.25 each in 100K quantities.