VIA continues diversifying its products. The situation in the chipset market is not very favorable for VIA that is why they are doing their best to apply their energy and ambitions most efficiently. As you know, the company has already established the production of chips for optical drives and some mainboard controllers, including USB controllers, IEEE1394 controllers, network chips, TV-Out controllers, audio codecs and Super I/O. Now VIA is planning to start making IDE controllers as well.

According to our sources, VIA is about to launch two new IDE controllers supporting Parallel ATA and Serial ATA interfaces simultaneously. These will be VIA VT6410 and VIA VT6420.

VT6410 is an ATA/133 RAID controller connected to the PCI bus. It supports two ATA/133 channels and RAID 0, 1, 0+1 arrays. As for the second chip, VT6420, it will implement 2 SerialATA-150 channels, one ATA/133 channel and RAID functions. This way, VIA will offer the market a few standard chips for further integration onto mainboard PCBs. Bearing in mind that they have very stable customer case, IDE RAID controllers from VIA have every chance to become a success.

VIA VT6410 and VT6420 are already sampling. The launching schedule for these solutions hasn’t been yet finalized.