Serial ATA Design and Test
Application Notes
New Challenges
The Serial ATA International Organizations (SATA-IO) has released the SATA Revision 3.0 specification, providing support for 6 Gb/s data transfer between hosts, devices and port multipliers. At higher data rates, power consumption and emissions become more of a concern on system budgets. Link designers seek to find optimum voltages, emphasis levels and edge rates to manage these challenging design limits while ensuring functional protocol operation at the receiver. The SATA-IO has designed a comprehensive interoperability test program to assess the electromechanical physical layer design limits, protocol state machine branching and command execution as well as system-level functional operation. The goal of the program is to improve interoperability between SATA products in the market, and to provide an equitable test vehicle through which all vendors’ products can be fairly compared to the provisions of the specification. Several new features and test requirements exist within the SATA Revision 3.0 specification, which require new tools and new validation methods to assess accurately.