IDF Fall 2000 Summary

On the Floor - Serial ATA

Located very near the Intel booths was a large section of the floor dedicated to Silicon Image, the company currently working hard on making serial ATA a reality. The demonstrations as well as the presentation were very similar to what we saw at this spring's IDF, as we reported on here. Silicon Image once again demonstrated Serial ATA technology by taking a standard parallel ATA connection found on a motherboard, running it to a dongle of sorts that converted the parallel ATA signal to serial ATA, and then through a cable. This cable then led to another dongle that converted the serial ATA signal back to parallel ATA for use with a normal hard drive. The reason that the setup would have to be this way is due to the fact that there are currently no devices that use serial ATA as of yet. Expect devices to appear once the specification gets finalized later this year.

Here is a picture of what Silicon Image had running in their setup. Note the extremely small cable size for the serial ATA connection, as well as the fans currently cooling the logic on the dongles. Silicon Image said that these fans were most likely unnecessary, but at a show it is better to be safe than sorry.

Click here to enlarge.

Click here to enlarge.