Tokyo Electron launches ATA interface chip to SD card

Supports High-Speed Data UHS-1 interface with up to 104 Mbyte/second at up to 208MHz
Tokyo Electron Device has launched a chip for bridging the latest high-speed interface standard for SD memory cards and Multi-Media Cards (MMCs) and ATA or CompactFlash interfaces. Sample shipments will start in June.
The move to higher image quality in digital devices has led to memory media with greater capacity and higher data transfer speeds, including high-speed continuous shooting function in digital cameras and long-duration recording of full high definition video in digital movie cameras, so the latest standard for SD memory cards defines the UHS-I interface to support higher speeds (SDR50: 50 Mbyte/s, SDR104: 104 Mbyte/s, DDR50: 50Mbyte/s, etc.).
The inrevium TE4302 is a controller chip that supports UHS-I of the latest SD card standard and MMC DDR mode of MMC standard and has a function for bridging between these media interfaces and other interfaces such as ATA and CF. Supporting SDR104 ,which is the highest bus speed mode of the UHS-I, the LSI maximizes data transfer performance with the new generation of UHS-I SD memory cards.
For multiple applications, the host side interface can be configured to connect to a 32-bit or 16-bit synchronous CPU interface instead of ATA or CF. Also, the media interface supports two channels.
Tokyo Electron is aiming the chip at devices that require high-speed data transfer of high-quality video data such as digital cameras, digital video cameras, televisions, and car navigation systems, but the chipcould also be used to add a solid state disk (SSD) capability using SD cards via the ATA interface as it willsupport SD cards up to 2TBytes. HOwever, it does not support embedded boot execution from the disk at this point.

TE4302 Features

• Media interface: 2 channels 
• Bus width: 1/4 bit 
• Supported bus speed modes: SDR104 / SDR50 / SDR25 / SDR12 / DDR50 / High Speed / Default Speed
• Supported memory capacities: SDXC (64GB to 2TB) / SDHC (4GB to 32GB) / SDSC (up to 2GB) 
• Supports Embedded SD Addendum 2.10 (Boot function is not supported)
• Supports 4-bit asynchronous interrupts specified by SDIO specification Ver. 3.00 (not finalized), supports 8-bit bus with Embedded SDIO
  

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