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Building on its leadership in providing silicon for high- capacity storage in consumer electronics (CE), Agere Systems (NYSE:AGR), Allentown, Pa., has announced a new highly integrated system-on-a-chip (SoC) tailored for miniature hard disk drives used in portable CE devices. This low-power chip provides complete support for perpendicular recording and new interface standards to enable small-form-factor drive designs that offer three times the capacity of flash-based storage at lower cost.
The enormous popularity of hand-held consumer appliances that use high-capacity storage -- from digital music players to mobile phones and digital cameras -- is challenging the disk drive industry to develop unique solutions that meet rapidly evolving application demands and compete effectively against flash. Perpendicular recording techniques represent the most effective way to increase storage space in thumbprint-sized drives, allowing portable media products to expand beyond digital music to incorporate video and other high- capacity files that require multiple gigabytes of storage.
The latest product in Agere's TrueStore(R) CE chip set family, the SC1200 SoC brings together multiple drive functions, perpendicular recording support, as well as CE-ATA and multimedia card (MMC) host bus interface options -- all in a single, integrated solution. As new small-form-factor drive designs incorporate perpendicular recording, Agere's chip offers a 0.5 dB performance advantage over competing SoCs, translating to nearly 10 percent more capacity. For 1.0-inch disk drives -- the most popular miniature drive size on the market -- Agere's SC1200 can enable more than 12 gigabytes of storage, a 3x improvement over today's flash memory.
"Clearly, consumer applications present the most exciting opportunity we have ever seen in the disk drive industry, and...