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General SATA support in a DSP design

howy
Intellectual 460 points

I am designing a product using a 6747 DSP (using all 3 McASPs so I can't use the 6748) and I require SATA support. This product is replacing an older design that uses a 6713 connected to a PATA hard drive.

I have considered connecting a PATA to SATA bridge chip to the 6747 to accomplish this but I don't see anything but the Marvell 88SA8040. Since my product will be in production for the next 10 years I need something that will be around for a while also.

I am also considering adding a 6748 to the board and using it as if it were a SATA adapter chip (wasting a few dollars on this design is not a big deal if it can get me to market quicker), but I dont want to use Linux to drive it as I need a fast boot time (7 seconds) and no external SDRAM. 

I see references to chip support libraries for the 6748 SATA interface but I also see a lot of unanswered questions about it not working all the time.

Are there any other chips from TI that I should consider?

Do you have any recommendations or warnings for me concerning SATA implementation on this 6747 based board I am designing?

thanks,

-howy

  • 0
    Intellectual 370 points

    Hi, Howy,

     

    We were faced with similar, though not exact, tradeoff in a recent design. 

     

    You are using all 3 McASPs, so you either have 3 clock zones, or lots of channels, or both.  One alternative we considered is using a c6748 as the main DSP, and collecting McASP channels with either another cheap DSP or FPGA (tends to be more expensive), for TDM delivery to 6748 McASP.  If appropriate, you might also consider different multi-channel codecs that mux more than two channels (L/R) per serial data line.

     

    best regards,

    Cameron

     

  • 0 in reply to kemeron
    Intellectual 460 points

    Yes, I have a lot of audio channels.   I don't mind using the extra 6748 as I will need another processor anyway.

    I guess I am more concerned about weather the SATA DSP/BIOS PSP drivers really work. 

    I suppose I could allso use the 6748 for supporting my USB interface too (assuming the PSP allows me to access external USB hard drives).

    Is anyone out there successfully using the SATA or USB (host block device) drivers in a non-linux environmet?

    -howy

  • 0 in reply to howy
    Guru 31670 points

    Howy,

    If boot time is your concern for not going for Linux, then I have a solution for that. 

    We've done boot time optimization on different TI platforms and has achieved very good boot time numbers as good as 2.6 secs on Linux with applications. We could boot linux kernel with bootloader and mount the filesystem in about 700ms on DM36x. If you are interested please get in touch with us.

    -Renjith

    www.pathpartnertech.com