February 20, 2006 -- Agere Systems, Inc. today announced what it claims is the industry's lowest power storage read channel for PCs and consumer electronics. This latest Agere offering provides up to a 50% power reduction over other solutions enabling hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers to use a single, high-performance design to develop drives for the largest volume storage applications. This read channel targets 2.5- and 3.5-inch HDD applications in desktop and notebook PCs, consumer electronics, and enterprise applications such as blade servers.

Developed in e 90-nm CMOS process technology, Agere's new TrueStore RC7200 delivers market-leading perpendicular recording support to expand the amount of storage capacity in a drive to 240 GB/platter. With the RC7200, consumers get the benefit of longer battery life in their mobile devices and more space to store their digital photos, movies, music and other multimedia. In addition, this channel supports enterprise applications such as server blades or near-line disk-to-disk backup for home or office.

The RC7200 offers several key benefits:

Improved performance and perpendicular recording support. The RC7200 offers outstanding signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) performance for increasing areal densities to next-generation capacity nodes of 240 GB/platter and more. As drive designs continue to transition to perpendicular recording techniques to improve storage capacities, Agere's channel offers up to a 0.5-dB SNR advantage over competing silicon, translating to nearly 10 percent more capacity or higher yields at equivalent capacities. A broad dynamic range of clock speeds (100 MHz to 2.0 GHz data rates) enables scaling SoC power and performance to support multiple HDD market segments. Power reduction. The RC7200 lowers chip-level power consumption while improving overall system power management by leveraging 90-nm CMOS process technologies, voltage scaling, multiple power modes and other circuit design techniques. In addition, the channel can accommodate power-optimized 2.5 volt analog/1.0 volt digital drive configurations while also supporting 3.3/1.2 volt legacy designs, giving disk drive designers increased flexibility with a single electronics platform.

Pricing and Availability

Agere is currently shipping fully functional RC7200 silicon samples to drive customers, enabling them to rapidly develop read-write subsystems and firmware for next-generation programs. Pricing for SoC designs incorporating this channel technology ranges from $8 to $10 in sample quantities.