OVERVIEW
®
Phone: 949-450-8700
Fax: 949-450-8710
E-mail: info@broadcom.com
Web: www.broadcom.com
BROADCOM CORPORATION
16215 Alton Parkway, P.O. Box 57013
Irvine, California 92619-7013
© 2004 by BROADCOM CORPORATION. All rights reserved.
5773-PB01-R 10/08/04
Broadcom®, the pulse logo, and Connecting everything® are trademarks of Broadcom Corporation and/
or its subsidiaries in the United States and certain other countries. All other trademarks mentioned are the
property of their respective owners.
The BCM5773 is a complete SATA-II RAID-on-Chip (RoC) solution
that significantly reduces CPU utiliz ation and system desig n complexity
and time . In addition to int eg ra tin g all hardware necessary to implement
high-performance RAID and multiport SATA connectivity, it also
integrates a complete RAID Stack that runs on the internal MIPS
processor, re presenti ng a comp lete subsystem solu tion th at can be easily
integrated into a server or external storage system.
The device communicates with the host using one of two flexible
options: a x4 PCI-Express interface, or a PCI-X1.0 interface. A bridging
option between the PCI-E and PCI-X interfaces enables extra PCI-X
slots to be availab le for I/O expa nsion when th e PCI-E interface is used
as a host i nte rface t o the BCM5 773. It att aches d irect ly to eigh t SATA-
II disk drive backplanes via a high-performance, integrated SATA PHY
that is capable of driving long-length backplanes. Hot-Plug capability is
also supp orted, enabli ng dri ves to be inse rted/remo ved witho ut affe cting
system operation.
A high-ban dwidth host arbiter (1 GB/s) decouples the host interface from
the SATA ports and embedded processor, enabling maximum
throughput for workloads demanding sequential I/O performance.
During a WRIT E Ope ra tio n, Data move s from ho st memory to th e loc al
memory via the QDMA engine embedded in the memory controller unit
(MCU). An XOR operation is then (o ptionally) applied to the da ta within
the MCU, after which the data is then written to the SATA drives via
high-performance QDMA engin es embedded in the SATA ports.
During a READ Operation, the SATA QDMA engine can move the data
from the drives to either local memory (READ caching) or directly to
host memor y (uncached).
The BCM577 3 prov ides an interrup t coalesci ng me chanism to pace the
host interrupts it generates. This allows host software to batch-process
interrupts efficiently. In addition, the BCM5773 also incorporates a
mechani sm to reduce IO reads by periodically DMAi ng the BCM5773
Status Block into host memory. Both of these mechanisms vastly reduce
the host CPU utilization by limiting the amount of adaptor accesses that
must be performed
A Low Pin Count (LPC) Interface Specification 1.0 compliant interface
is available to connect the BCM5773 to an external flash/ROM. Four
pins are used to implement an SGIO interface for drive activity and
general-purpose I/O. Dual I2C interfaces running is also available to
communicate with an external enclosure man agement devi ce or a Serial
EEPROM.
Built-in PRBSs or ps e u do - ra ndom bit sequ e nc e t est generators/ch ec k er s
are available per-port for PHY testing without the use of additional
hardware or drives. These are programmed from the in-b and PCI-X or
PCI-E interfaces.
BCM5773
Memory
External SATA Interface
BCM5773
Memory
5706
ISCSI Stack
RAID Stack
PCI-X Bus
GbE BCM5773
BCM5773
5706
Memory
Controller
Memory
Controller
Processors
DDR
DDR
DDR
DDR
DDR
DDR
PCI-X
BCM5773
SATA
RAID
PCI-E
Memory
DDR
DDR
DDR
DDR
DDR
DDR
Southbridge
BCM5773
RAID
BCM5773 Applications
External Storage System Server Storage