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Product category: Communications ICs (Wired)
News Release from: Agere Systems | Subject: TrueStore RC1300
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 7 February 2007

Read channel saves
power for handheld drives

Fully functional 90nm TrueStore read channel features the industry's lowest power consumption and highest performance within the market for handheld consumer electronics

Agere Systems has begun shipping a new fully functional 90nm TrueStore read channel that features the industry's lowest power consumption and highest performance within the market for handheld consumer electronics. The TrueStore RC1300 uses half the electrical current required by the previous generation of read channels in this market segment, thereby significantly extending the battery life of electronic devices, such as MP3 players and portable media players, without recharge.

Moreover, the new channel increases storage capacity by speeding the data transmission rate by 25% and boosting the signal-to-noise ratio over the previous generation of channel.

Because the RC1300 is the newest in Agere's Copperhead family of read channels, hard disk drive (HDD) makers can leverage their existing software investments in the TrueStore RC7200 serving the desktop and laptop markets and minimise their investment in added software for the new read channel.

The TrueStore RC1300 targets the 1.8in and smaller HDD form factor that provides critical data storage of 20 to 160Gbyte in a wide variety of consumer devices, including MP3 players, portable media players and digital camcorders.

With its smaller die size, RC1300 enables consumer device makers to develop smaller and more creative designs for handheld devices.

First samples are achieving design targets for power and performance, and Agere expects the TrueStore RC1300 to be in production in 2008.

Ruediger Stroh, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Agere's Storage division, said: 'The TrueStore RC1300 achieves two difficult objectives: it enables greater storage capacity while at the same time dramatically reducing power consumption'.

'Moreover it accomplishes this at an ultrasmall size that gives disk drive manufacturers and device makers greater freedom to be creative in their form-factor designs'.

A read channel encodes and decodes data and ensures the accuracy of all data read from or written to a disk drive.

Read channels act as the linchpin of custom storage SoCs, which combine multiple functions, including hard disk controller, serial interface and memory, on a single chip.

On power performance, the TrueStore RC1300 not only reduces chip-level power consumption while enhancing power management, it also marks a major advance in read channel design and incorporates multiple pending patents for power reduction.

In addition to its low power consumption while a device is operating, the RC1300 features the lowest power consumption when devices are in nonoperating, or standby, mode.

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