2008-5-9

SAN DIEGO, Calif., April 28, 2008 – Symwave, Inc., a privately-held supplier of high-performance analog/mixed signal semiconductor solutions for the PC, consumer and mobile devices, today announced that its “FirePHY-800” 1394b S800 Physical Layer (PHY) solution has commenced shipping to Taiwan-based SSI Computer Corp.
Symwave’s FirePHY-800 solution is a 3-port device which supports legacy FireWire 400/200/100 (IEEE 1394a) connections and high-speed 800 Mbps FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b) connections. The Symwave FirePHY-800 device is compatible with all of the latest 1394b-to-SATA controller solutions on the market today and supports MacOS, Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems.
SSI recently introduced two new external hard-disk drive (HDD) enclosure models that utilize the Symwave FirePHY-800 device. The SI7908, designed for Century Japan, and the SI7968, designed for a US storage OEM, are unique enclosure designs that allow individual 2.5” or 3.5” HDDs to be easily ejected and swapped. This functionality is particularly useful for consumers who desire redundant data backups on multiple different HDDs. A dual-bay enclosure, SI1328, and a quad-bay enclosure, SI1348, are also in development based on the same Symwave PHY solution and will be shown at Computex Taipei 2008, June 3-7, 2008.
“We are very pleased to be working with Symwave to deliver high quality HDD storage enclosures to our customers,” said Ken Chen, Assistant President of SSI Computer. “The Symwave solution has allowed us to differentiate our external enclosures from the competition and offer a higher performance, more robust product at a lower cost.”
"The Symwave FirePHY-800 solution enables external storage manufacturers and ODMs, such as SSI, to deliver more robust FireWire 800 enclosures at a price point that was not previously possible,” said Jim Kappes, Marketing Director at Symwave. “Symwave’s complete reference design kit and strong technical support enabled SSI to go from concept to pre-production in less than 3 months.”
Consumer demand for external storage is growing exponentially worldwide due to the increased availability and proliferation of digital multimedia content and a desire to backup this valuable, often personal, content. As the capacity of external hard drives continues to increase, the digital interface (typically USB) has become a major bottleneck in transferring large amounts of data from a PC to an external storage device. In a typical backup test transferring 500 GB of data, it required more than 25 hours to complete the data transfer over a USB 2.0 interface, compared to 6.7 hours over a FireWire 800/1394b interface. With FireWire 1600 (1394b S1600) technology, which Symwave was the first to demonstrate recently, the same 500 GB transfer can be accomplished in about 3.3 hours, a 7.5x speed improvement compared to USB 2.0. As a result of the massive speed improvements with 1394b and the fact that silicon costs are dropping significantly with increased competition, the market for 1394b-enabled storage devices is expected to grow at a faster rate than the overall storage market over the next 3-5 years.
Symwave offers a variety of FireWire 800 (1394b)-to-SATA HDD reference designs and engineering design services that can greatly accelerate time-to-market for ODMs and OEMs. Symwave also provides its customers with value-added support services such as compatibility testing, performance testing, and signal integrity testing of customer designs at its flagship design/test center in Shenzhen, China.
The Symwave FirePHY-800 device, SW3080, is in mass production and widely available. A pin-compatible device that supports S1600, SW3160, is sampling to limited customers and partners.