Advanced RISC Machines Ltd’s 32-bit ARM RISC is to play a role in a new line of disk subsystems from IBM Corp. The Cambridge, UK company’s partner, VLSI Technology Inc, San Jose, has signed a memorandum of understanding to develop and fabricate for IBM chips that implement its new Serial Storage Architecture interface, and will be built around the ARM RISC. IBM, which developed the Serial Storage Architecture interface for disk arrays in the UK (CI No 2,328), wants it to be accepted as a standard, and reckons it needs multiple sources for the chips to achieve that end; it is committed to buying for its own requirements from VLSI, which will add the interface architecture to its proprietary FSB cell library.Developed for industry-wide use by IBM in Havant, Serial Storage Architecture is designed to offer an easy migration path for SCSI systems, needing only minimal rewriting of supporting code. A flexible addressing scheme supports string, loop or switched connections. Each link operates at a full-duplex rate of 20M-bytes per second in each direction for 80Mbps at the node.
