Junko Yoshida

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EE Times

(05/24/2005 2:19 PM EDT)

PARIS — Anticipating the eventual need for a home ``gigabit pipe`` to distribute high-definition video content over home networks, Agere Systems has developed a family of storage chips designed for use in digital media servers, multiuser personal video recorders and network attached storage devices.

The company will demonstrate an engineering prototype next week at Computex in Taipei. Agere`s new media server chips, priced at as much as $36 per 1,000 units, are scheduled for general sampling in July. The chip`s price varies in accordance with the number of hard-disk drives supported, ranging from one drive to eight.

The chip family is capable of streaming multimedia content at 1 Gbit/s and can move multimedia file transfers within homes and businesses 20 times faster than current devices, according to Agere.

Multimedia content for the home is increasingly video-centric. It`s now possible for several family members to simultaneously stream or download high-definition movies onto different TV sets. This turns home networks into ``choking points,`` predicted Surinder Rai, director of client access products in Agere`s enterprise & networking division. Inevitably, new multimedia applications will ``demand a gigabit pipeline,`` he stressed.

Agere said its new media server controllers provide an interface between a network and an array of hard drives for storing a personal media archive. Their mission is to enable multiuser, multimedia, concurrent streaming sessions to networked storage devices.

Agere developed the chips with two requirements in mind: the need to protect personal content in a storage device and faster access to stored content. ``What consumers store in a home server is truly personal. [It} needs to be well protected in a storage device featuring redundancy,`` said Rai. ``Consumers don`t want to wait for 30 minutes to access what they want to watch,`` he added.

IdaRose Sylvester, a senior analyst with International Data Corp., said a new device class is emerging that she called the ``home networked attached storage,`` or HomeNAS. ``It makes sense to be able to store, backup and access your data in one device.`` With companies such as Broadcom and Infrant Technologies (Fremont, Calif.) also jumping on the HomeNAS bandwagon, Sylvester estimated the entire semiconductor bill of materials cost for HomeNAS (including memory and storage chips) will grow from $200 million in 2006 to ``significantly more than $500 million`` in 2008.

What`s inside?

Integrated into Agere`s storage chips are high performance network interfaces, including a Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000) Media Access Control (MAC) for high bandwidth local-area network applications and a Universal Serial Bus 2.0 for connectivity to a wireless LAN.

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EE Times

(05/24/2005 2:19 PM EDT)

The chips also include a multiport (1, 2, 4 and 8) Serial Advance Technology Attachment Level 1 (SATA-1) storage controller that interfaces with up to eight hard drives. The chips promise low-overhead media archive protection via streaming Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) that is similar to a fault-tolerant server. The configuration aims to enable continuous operation if one of a drives fails.

The key feature is a hard-wired block responsible for traffic management. The traffic management arbitrator provides ``fast path`` hardware acceleration from hard drive to network interface. Agere`s Rai explained that it ``dynamically allocates resources`` — network, memory and drives — according to session type and depending on whether the bandwidth is guaranteed or best effort.

It also adjusts resources based on application activity, enabling high-speed bursts for multi-PC backups and guaranteed bandwidth for latency-sensible media sessions. This session-aware traffic management capability, together with an embedded upper layer protocol accelerator, allows the chips to run efficiently with 1 Gbit/s throughput.

Agere has reused several previously developed ``front-end functions`` in its server chips, including interfaces and storage/network controllers. But it has spent the last 24 months developing new blocks for RAID, traffic management and the upper-layer processor for the new chips, according to Rai. The media server chips can, in effect, schedule and deliver guaranteed quality-of-service for up to eight HDTV streaming sessions (20 megabits/sec each).

Rai disagreed that the gigabit pipe might be overkill in the home. Many industry standards enabling high-definition multimedia content distribution within home ``have started to come together,`` he noted. Agere expects media server chips to be designed into production devices scheduled for market launch in 2006.

Agere will also offer a digital media server reference platform consisting of its media server chips, three hard drives and software components developed by its partner, Digital 5 Inc. The software includes streaming for WMA, MP3, AAC, LPCM audio files along with standard video formats such as WMV, MPEG1, MPEG2 and MPEG4. It can also render digital photo files stored in most formats.

The platform, running on an embedded Linux operating system, uses Universal Plug-and-Play, integrated third-party middleware and the Digital Living Network Alliance standard in order to provide interoperability with media client devices.