ACARD Technology Corp. is a leading international developer of storage solutions, particularly in the fields of SCSI and IDE technologies. It established its headquarters in Kwang Fu Rd., Taipei, Taiwan. Daniel Weng, its present CEO, founded ACARD in September 1996. It started as a small company with only four people; Weng, Stephenson Liu, Laurence Wu, and Anne Chen. Weng decided to focus on SCSI because of the benefits of higher profits, absence of local competition, low costs, hard entry, and difficult manufacturing.
At present, Liu acts as the General Manager, Wu as the Vice General Manager, and Chen as the Administrative Manager. The company currently holds offices in Los Angeles, California, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and San Jose, California. Key milestones for ACARD include its establishment in 1996, the launching of the RAID subsystem called Mirror Smart in 2000, ISO9001 certification in 2003, and its IPO in 2004 in the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
ACARD has a broad range of storage-related products including storage ICs such as copy controllers between the various devices for UNIX, Linux, Macintosh and PC workstations. The company developed SCSI-to-IDE Bridge with the SCSIDE engine core chip, the second evolution of the SCSIDE technology to increase data transfer speed. It also developed the solid state DRAM/SD memory devices that offer faster data speed compared to flash drives and hard drives. It also provides the Smart Mini series, IDEs, Serial ATA and SCSI adapters, the Copy Smart Plus family of DVD/BD/CD controllers that duplicates without having to connect to a computer, RAID controllers, network storage products, Disk Box for DAR/Media Streaming/DAR file systems, and software such as the Ha! DVD Burner.
ACARD's SCSIDE engine combines an IDE core, an SCSI core, and a CPU core in one integrated circuit with the incorporation of SOC technology. It also developed SCSI adapters for a complete range of storage devices intended for SCSI users. This family of products covers SCSI-3 generations ranging from Ultra to Ultra 160. For its adapters for Serial ATA, the company created thinner cabling, reliable bus, and lower power requirements. Its IDE adapters supply rapid data transfer with data protection. These adapters have integral controllers for Ultra ATA 133 adjustable in either a non-RAID or RAID adapter. The RAID controllers provide data safeguarding and instant backup. These RAID controllers contain the SCSIDE engine that affords a highly reliable interface for a hard disk.
ACARD currently emphasizes network storage and the administration and safeguarding of critical information on storage devices in their solutions.
