Implementing a Serial ATA Controller Base on FPGA

In order to store massive image data in real-time system, a high performance Serial Advanced Technology Attachment[1] (SATA) controller is proposed in this paper. RocketIO GTX transceiver[2] realizes physical layer of SATA protocol. Link layer and transport layers are implemented in VHDL with programmable logic resources. Application layer is developed on POWERPC440 embedded in Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA. The whole SATA protocol implement in a platform FPGA has better features in expansibility, scalability, improvability and in-system programmability comparing with realizing it using Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). The experiment results shown that the controller works accurately and stably and the maximal sustained orderly data transfer rate up to 110 MB/s when connect to SATA hard disk. The high performance of the host SATA controller makes it possible that cheap SATA hard disk instead expensive Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) hard disk in some application. The controller is very suited for high speed mass data storage in embedded system.