MULTI-HOST SATA CONTROLLER

摘要

Described herein is a system having a multi-host SATA controller (102) configured to provide communication and control between two or more independent host processors (104) and a single SATA device (108). In one implementation, the multi-host SATA controller (102) includes the device switching layer (206), the device control layer (208), the link layer (210), and the physical layer (212). The device switching layer (206) allows the host processors (104) to issue commands concurrently rather than in sequential order. For this, the device switching layer (206) has independent set of host device registers (214) corresponding to each of the host processors (104). The device switching layer (206) also has independent DMA engines (216) to perform a command pre-fetching from respective host system memories (105). Further, a command switch engine (220) may arbitrate commands in case both the host processors (104) wish to access the SATA device (108) simultaneously.