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New RoHS compliant SiliconDrive
products of the Californian manufacturer SiliconSystems will be
gradually equipped with the new SiSMART, starting
in the second quarter of 2006 with CompactFlash Cards.
With the introduction of a RoHS compliant production prozess, the SiSMART
feature will
be integrated in the SiliconDrive standard products without
price premium.
These new standard products, marked with an
added -3500 to the article number, have multi-word
DMA and autosense fixed
in IDE mode and removable device in PCMCIA
mode.
This new patent pending technology monitors
the write/erase cycles of the flash cells in the cards and drives.
This way it is possible to predict the remaining life
span of the products and to plan the future usage.
SiSMART comprises SiSTAT, SiWEAR and SiSPARE.
SiSTAT returns the write/erase
statistics of each flash cell block.
SiWEAR is the most useful feature since it yields the percentage of wear of the entire drive/card based
on the data gained by SiSTAT.
SiSPARE yields the number of spare sectors used and number of spares
remaining. Because all flash cells are being evenly worn due to the outstanding
Wear-Leveling, this ratio is of almost no significance in all SiliconDrive
products. Spare sectors are only used at the end of the product life.
The SiSMART utility can run on Windows XP, Linux or
DOS host systems.
Other
operating
system support will be available in the second half of 2006.
This executable
utility can also be integrated into applications
directly. Finally, software
libraries and source code will be available
under NDA to those customers who want to tailor this function to their
unique requirements.
Since February 2006 SiliconSystems’ entire
SiliconDrive product line comes equipped with the into the controller integrated SiSMART
without any extra charges. |
