I built my first crystal radio at about the age of ten (had help with the soldering iron) and have been dabbling in the analog electronics field ever since. The "James Brown of Analog": I do like James Brown and have I been working in the electronics industry for many years. I’m also a big fan of Reggae and Ska and spent my youth listening to John Peel on Radio 1. Ken Boothe is the greatest singer. Running is a passion. Squaw Valley is the best place to ski. Ever! Faster Booting For Netbooks
Posted by Navraj Nandra on August 30th, 2010
Booting from a solid state drive (SSD) is much faster than the traditional hard disk drives and this is just one of the many reasons that the SSD’s have become popular in consumer devices. To assist developers of these products, one of our partners Global Unichip (GUC) has developed an SSD reference platform for mobile applications such as netbooks, mobile internet devices (MIDs) and high-speed pen drives. The connection to the netbook is made via the high performance SATA bus as shown below.
The GP5080 reference platform, provides developers with a low power, high data system throughput of more than 120 MB/s in sequential read and over 80 MB/s in sequential write with 4-channel NAND Flash access.
Translated into layman’s language this is bags faster than hard disk drives during booting.
Below is a block diagram of the reference platform
As well as the SATA interface, the GP5080 features a 32-bit ARM7 processor.  This provides firmware capability to improve the SSD’s performance in terms of lifetime and reliability by providing higher computing capability such as a flash translation layer, bad block management, wear leveling algorithm and power fail recycling.
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