Ceva and Gennum’s Snowbush IP Group Partner

CEVA, Inc., a licensor of silicon intellectual property (SIP) platform solutions and DSP cores, and Gennum Corporation’s Snowbush IP Group (Snowbush) have partnered to deliver a complete Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 2.0 IP solution optimized for embedded storage applications. The integrated offering combines Snowbush silicon-proven 6.0Gbps PHY IP integrated with CEVA’s SAS 2.0 Controller IP, offering the industry’s most mature and feature rich SAS 2.0 IP solution.

                                             CEVA SAS Controller IP

With ever-increasing requirements for higher performance and higher reliability, the enterprise storage industry is rapidly evolving from parallel SCSI to Serial Attached SCSI. SAS 2.0, which doubles the line rate to 6Gbps compared to the previous generation, has now become the preferred choice for new SAS products designs. By offering a complete, licensable SAS 2.0 solution, CEVA and Snowbush are uniquely positioned to exploit the growing demand for embeddable SAS 2.0 IP, particularly for Solid State Drive (SSD) applications, where CEVA and Snowbush have extensive experience.

"Since the inception of the SATA and SAS standards, both CEVA and Snowbush have been industry leaders in serial storage IP, offering customers the best solutions available. Snowbush is excited to partner with CEVA to deliver a leading-edge SAS 2.0 solution," said Ewald Liess, General Manager of the Snowbush IP Group for Gennum. "By integrating best-of-breed technologies from both companies, we can offer a complete PHY plus Controller SAS 2.0 IP solution to our customers, further shortening the time to market for SAS 2.0 products."

"SAS-enabled storage solutions are one of the biggest drivers for the enterprise storage industry and we have worked closely with Snowbush’s Storage IP Group to ensure our customers have access to a complete and fully integrated SAS 2.0 IP solution," said Aviv Malinovitch, vice president, operations at CEVA. "In particular, the rich feature suite and flexibility of our complete SAS offering is ideal for deployment in embedded SSD controllers, removing the need for discrete bridge chips and thereby increasing performance and reducing overall cost for SAS-enabled SSD designs."

The CEVA-SAS 2.0 Controller IP provides both Target and Initiator functionality. Suitable for narrow or wide port implementations for 6.0/3.0/1.5Gbps data rates, it supports many enterprise level features including SCSI SBC-2 End-to-End Protection (DIF) and high performance, full duplex DMA with IEEE 1212.1 Scatter/Gather. Reflecting the system complexities of SAS, it provides a comprehensive configuration, control and alarm / status monitoring interface with extensive metric counters and error injection facilities. With complete programmable control for Vendor Specific features, the CEVA-SAS 2.0 Controller IP enables customers to create highly differentiated and robust SAS 2.0 products.

The Snowbush-SAS PHY IP is designed for easy integration into SoC designs for storage applications in process geometries ranging from 130nm down to 40nm. The Snowbush-SAS PHY’s programmable high-swing transmit driver can produce 1.8V p-p output swings, exceeding the SAS-2 specification requirements for maximum peak-to-peak voltage. The advanced TX equalization provides up to 12dB of pre-emphasis, and includes independent control of pre-cursor and post-cursor levels. Built-in spread spectrum clock (SSC) generation supports down-spreading and center-spreading for maximum flexibility without the need for an external SSC clock source. Enhanced receiver equalization, including an auto-calibrating continuous time linear equalizer (CTLE) and decision feedback equalization (DFE), are included to meet the demands of lossy SAS-2 backplanes. Snowbush-SAS PHY is silicon proven in volume production and Snowbush offers expert integration support enabling customers to meet their market and product differentiation goals.