NEWS RELEASE

Doc. No.: PR/97-139
Reply to: Barbara Bennett at bbennett@itic.nw.dc.us

Washington D.C., November 1997 - NCITS Announces the Public Comment Period for IEEE-1394 to AT Attachment - Tailgate. Development of this draft standard is being done in technical committee T13, I/O Interface - AT Attachment.

The public review extends from December 5, 1997 to February 3, 1998.

This standard specifies the protocol for passing ATA and ATAPI commands over the 1394 bus. It provides a common attachment interface for systems manufacturers, system integrators, software suppliers, and suppliers of intelligent storage devices. The application environment for the 1394 to AT Attachment Interface is any system that interfaces AT Attachment storage devices via the 1394 Bus. This standard defines the following attributes and features, required to interface AT Attachment devices via the standard 1394/SBP-2 mechanisms:

- Register addresses and bit definitions

- Request block and status block formats

- Command and status delivery

- Tailgate Protocol

- ATA and ATAPI command set restrictions

Restrictions have been applied to the ATA and ATAPI command sets and SBP-2 protocols to simplify the design of the tailgate. These restrictions are believed to have no material impact on tailgate performance or capabilities. Certain 1394 architectural characteristics, such as read and write data packet transfer size, have no bearing on this standard and are therefore not specified. These characteristics will be defined by the customer for the various tailgate implementations and target environments. The tailgate shall have the following limitations over those features and capabilities defined in the SBP- 2 and ATA/ATAPI-4 standards:

- The tailgate shall not support 1394 isochronous capability. Only asynchronous data transfers are supported.

- The tailgate shall support a single login at a time to each logical unit.

- The Read Multiple (C416) and Write Multiple (C516) ATA commands shall not be supported by the tailgate.

- The Read Long (2216 and 2316) and Write Long (3216 and 3316) ATA commands shall not be supported by the tailgate.

- The Command Queuing and Overlap features defined by the ATA/ATAPI-4 standard shall not be supported by the tailgate.

Submit all comments to:

NCITS Secretariat, Attn.: Barbara Bennett, 1250 Eye Street, NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20005, Email: bbennett@itic.nw.dc.us.

ANSI, Attn.: BSR Center, 11 West 42nd St., New York, NY 10036, Email: (wluk@ansi.org).

A call for possible patents and pertinent issues (copyrights, trademarks) is also being issued. Please submit information on these issues to the NCITS Secretariat at 1250 Eye Street NW, Suite 200, Washington DC 20005. Email: NCITS @itic.nw.dc.us

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