August 23, 2012 -- Arasan Chip Systems, Inc. has announced the availability of what the company says is the industry fastest SD 3.0-compliant hardware-validation platform for engineering and product development of SD 3.0 devices with UHS-I interface. Arasan has demonstrated its SD 3.0 hardware-validation platform (HVP) running at more than 90MBps sustained read and more than 70MBps sustained write using a Linux storage-device benchmark.

The SD 3.0 specification calls out the maximum performance of 104MBps running at SDR104 mode. In real applications, due to the protocol overhead and different SD 3.0 device controller designs, the actual measured performance can vary dramatically from system to system. Arasan has optimized it Linux-based SD 3.0 Host HVP and tested its performance by running the Linux storage-device benchmark against a SD 3.0 card from one of the leading SD card manufacturers, capable of 95MBps read performance.

Arasan's HVP enables early validation of the SD3 .0 specification by emulating the SD3.0 Host at the interface-protocol level. Beyond this, it facilitates early application development for reference-board designs and production testing, before the SD 3.0 memory cards are available in silicon.. Further in the product cycle, it acts as a reference platform to help root-cause any incompatibilities between the device under development and the silicon device it is communicating with.

Often, a developer of cutting-edge silicon products with new standard interface protocols has no means of validating a design with complementary devices which themselves may be under development. When such complementary devices do become available, a full-speed reference platform that faithfully adheres to the protocol and provides the accompanying software stacks is necessary to aid the bring-up of a device trying to communicate with another for the first time, followed by rapid deployment of reference boards to OEM's and production testing of the OEM's end products.

Availability

Arasan's SD 3.0 Host Validation Platform is available immediately for shipment, including Linux OS-based hardware with SD3.0 Host Controller FPGA board, Linux software stack in binary, and all of the required support files and documentation.

Posted by: John Miklosz