March 19, 2008 -- K-Micro (Kawasaki Microelectronics) and Tandberg Data, a supplier of backup and archiving solutions, today announced that Tandberg Data’s new generation of tape drives use K-micro's SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) IP core, which enabled the new drives to migrate to SAS from SCSI.
"Our tape drive customers want to be able to move from SCSI and other interfaces to SAS in their tape drives," said James Jackson, Product Manager at Tandberg Data. "It was the flexibility to have a specialized core that was the deciding factor in choosing K-micro as our ASIC supplier for our new generation of tape drives. This project had a very tight schedule, and we were able to meet our schedule requirements working with the K-micro team."
Development of the new line of Tandberg Data tape drives required access to the IP core to manage some of the functions embedded there that are not normally accessible to the users of the K-micro SAS IP. This was needed to optimize the IP for the new drives with additional functionality and performance as well as maintain firmware and software compatibility with previous generation products.
