Can anyone identify the manufacturer of this Chip ?

On a sunny day (Thu, 21 Jun 2007 14:45:41 -0000) it happened Antti wrote in :

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------------------------------------------------------------ Technical explanation

SD supports at least three transfer modes:

  • One-bit SD mode (separate command and data channels and a proprietary transfer format) * Four-bit SD mode (uses extra pins plus some reassigned pins) * SPI mode (basically, a simpler subset of the SD protocol for use with microcontrollers)

All memory cards must support all three modes, except for microSD where SPI is optional. The cards must also support clock frequencies of up to 25 MHz for regular cards, and 50 MHz for high-speed cards.

Royalties for SD/SDIO licenses are imposed for manufacture and sale of memory cards and host adapters ($1000 per year plus membership at $1500/year) but SDIO cards can be made without royalties and MMC host adapters do not require a royalty.

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So, I dunno. SD 2500$ /year for an adapter, how many cards will you sell? 10? Do I see this right?

8 SD or MMC cards of 1GB is now about 64 Euro I think. 10 Euro for the rest of the parts. 250 for the license??????? Not counting other IP you will need.

You tell me.

I think if cards from the same batch are used the timing issue is not that different. But you are right, you'd need to monitor for CRC or whatever, and wait for all 8 cards to complete. But the same issue applies for any other system, even or even more so if you want to 'stagger' the cards as in this example, maybe that is why so much logic? Maybe the guy who designed that board ran into this.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje
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disk.- Hide quoted text -

transfer format)

microcontrollers)

different.

8 cards

want

ausblenden -

the read delay is can be way different as it depends on the amount and location of bad blonks in the NAND, this is all transparent to the user, but the black management is done by the SD cards, what can cause essential difference in response times.

Antti

Reply to
Antti

On a sunny day (Thu, 21 Jun 2007 15:59:58 -0000) it happened Antti wrote in :

different.

all 8 cards

want

ausblenden -

OK, I have been thinking a bit, and it seems to me we are not going to see many of these cards on the market. It is simpler for a manufacturer to just solder some FLASH chips on a board, it is more reliable (no connectors), no expensive protocol (both financial and as overhead), FLASH is still falling in price (some 'up' predicted for next year perhaps). Maybe the FLASH chips are even cheaper then the SDcard connectors ;-) You'd have to do bad sector handling on board, but so what. Let's forget about this product :-)

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

different.

all 8 cards

you want

ausblenden -

many of

overhead),

you can forget ;) eh well I am doing several projects that are using SD Cards, so I keep my mind open

as of nand Flash there are NAND flash with built in ATA and there are NAND flash with built in SD card interface and there are NAND flash with built in USB interface and NAND flash with "differential clock" for high speed

...

so lots of thinking, what makes sense and where..

Antti

Reply to
Antti

i try to assume nothing. but, "buffer memory" would I think be proper for gadget where most of the complexity is "memory and/or buffer"

a ATA-SD interface is something that includes some buffer memory, but the buffer memory is not the main function, as most of complecity is in the interface parts.

Antti

Reply to
Antti

But buffer memory, and proper handling of it, may well make all the difference between a very good product, and a barely useable one.

There's a bunch of these chips on the board. I suspect they are buffer memories, one per SD card. And I suspect that they are important, or at least would be if the product ended up working the way it was intended to when the PCBs were made, otherwise they wouldn't be there.

There's also a controller, most likely in that spartan FPGA. Depending on what the buffers are used to accomplish, the controlling logic may be non-trivial.

Reply to
cs_posting

there are 4 times IDE-SD ASIC's, from company called c-guys

1 per SD card. those chips include FULL IDE2SD interface, each of them has local onchip buffers for 2 sector FPGA does some management only, to combine the 4 IDE into one, the SD IP core is not inside the FPGA at all..

Antti

Reply to
Antti

I've done it ...

-a

Reply to
Andy Peters

(replying to myself ... sheesh) .. actually, not with SD cards ... but with the NAND flash chips themselves.

-a

Reply to
Andy Peters

I think Mark means that he can do whatever's necessary in some kind of programmable logic device. Whether it's a CPLD or an FPGA is really just a detail.

-a

Reply to
Andy Peters

So why didn't you just say that in your first post and save all this running around in circles?

Reply to
cs_posting

Actually, if you're talking about UDMA, implementation _is_ trivial.

And for the record, I was probably a little flippant in my remark about CPLDs... I'll defer to Antti's judgement on that one...

Regards,

--
Mark McDougall, Engineer
Virtual Logic Pty Ltd, 
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Reply to
Mark McDougall

The SD core may not be in the FPGA, but if the device stripes data across the cards, which thanks to these ASICS present IDE interfaces, wouldn't it need to implement a fully IDE target to talk to the PC, and then multiple IDE hosts to talk to the ASICs? And quite possible a small amount of buffering in between... beginning to make sense for it to be an FPGA. Though perhaps not an elegant design.

Curious what that wide package device (1x) is. It looks like a flash memory device...

Reply to
cs_posting

Not a very smart design then...

--
Mark McDougall, Engineer
Virtual Logic Pty Ltd, 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Mark McDougall

Hi

Iam a newbie in linux. How to findout on an arm board that it has a debug port to use KGDB. I have an XSCALE(IQ80310) based board and want to use KGDB to debug my kernel module. I would like to know how to conclude that a development board has debugging supporting hardware.

Thanks in advance....

Regards Imtiaz Ahmed

Reply to
Imti

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