According to a recent Gartner/Dataquest report, shipments of sub 1 inch drives for non-PC markets are expected to grow from 40 million units in 2005 to 146 million units by 2009. The application areas fueling this growth are digital media players, digital recorders, digital audio players such as the wildly popular iPod from Apple Computers, multi-media cellular phones such as the recently ones developed by leading mobile telephone manufacturers.

CE-ATA is a new storage protocol initiated by the CE-ATA standard committee to address this new emerging market. Utilizing the proven MMC physical interface and a subset of the ATA protocol, CE-ATA is optimized for mobile power and performance; these are factors critical in mobile consumer electronic applications.

Without a Bus Doctor™ CE-ATA protocol analyzer, storage, silicon and design engineers will find working with this new storage technology challenging.