Portable Storage Applications
with Low-Power FPGAs
Storage is an integral part of portable electronic devices. Handheld devices will continue to use storage devices of increasing capacities in the future. The storage devices are broadly classified as flash storage devices and hard disk drives (HDD). Actel offers several CompanionCore IP cores that can readily be used in your design on Actel's low-power, flash-based FPGAs.
Flash Storage Devices are widely used today and are competing in capacity with HDD-based microdrives. The flash devices come in many different forms, supporting multiple protocols and standards.
- Secure Digital (SD) is the latest flash memory card format and is designed for use in portable devices.
- CompactFlash (CF) is a very small removable mass storage device for portable devices, and provides TrueIDE functionality compatible with ATA/ATAPI-4 and PCMCIA-ATA.
- NAND Flash memory technology allows greater storage densities and lower costs due to its faster erase and write times and a smaller chip area per cell than the NOR Flash.
Hard Disk Drives (HDD) are used in devices that require very high storage capacities, such as video recorders and camcorders. The controllers are also used in video/audio playback equipment that uses CD or DVD.
- Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) is the standard used to interface to these storage devices. With the introduction of Serial ATA, the original standard is now called Parallel ATA (PATA).
- Consumer Electronics-ATA (CE-ATA) is the interface standard that was derived from MMC, with the addition of ATA commands, small form factor, and power-conscious designs used in the latest consumer electronic devices.
