Seagate and TI: partners in progress

Greater storage capacity. Lower part count. Reduced power consumption. Faster, less expensive development. These are the main concerns facing the hard disk drive industry today as we design smaller, faster products to serve graphics oriented Windows applications and increasingly popular portable computers. These are the advances our customers expect from Seagate Technology, the world's largest maker of hard disk drives.

Our company invests heavily in the research and development we need to keep up with the market and stay ahead of our competition. We also rely on a small number of vital strategic partners to help us maintain the edge in technology and quality that has made Seagate a success.

One of our most valued strategic partners is Texas Instruments. We depend on TI for digital signal processors (DSPs) that provide the processing muscle required by advanced hard disk drives. We also count on TI for engineering support, development tools and silicon integration we need to reach the market first with the best and most advanced hard disk drives available.

In short, TI is our leading supplier of DSP Solutions.

Most hard disk drives we produce include at least one TI part, usually a DSP. With the ability to perform mathematical calculations at lightning speed, a DSP can place the read/write head of a hard disk drive over the appropriate track of a drive platter and keep it in the correct position while information is being stored or retrieved. Digital signal processors perform such mathematical calculations quickly and efficiently.

In addition to the performance of the DSP, it is important to us that TI offers a broad line of DSPs. We draw on the family of DSPs to create a family of hard disk drives that are differentiated from each other by a variety of features but share basic engineering, system architecture, firmware and development methodologies.

As a result, any product in our spectrum of hard disk drives can evolve quite easily to higher levels within its own part of the marketplace. Selecting another chip from the TI DSP family reduces our development risk and allows us to go to market quickly with a product that is differentiated from its sister products and from its competition.

The fact that TI is expert in devices other than DSPs--memory, logic, mixed signal, power, etc.--also is important to us. We want to integrate as many functions as possible onto a single piece of silicon because a lower chip count means smaller, less expensive hard disk drives that also conserve power. TI engineers work closely with us as we strive to move from today's five-chip system toward three chips and, eventually, a one-chip hard disk drive.

That co-development effort, by the way, in which TI's engineers work side-by-side with ours, is a big benefit to us. Seagate engineers know what we need to develop a new product. TI engineers know what is possible in semiconductor technology. The two groups play off of each other to find a solution that can be manufactured effectively to produce the results we want.

TI engineers also perform a valuable quality-control function in our manufacturing plants. They are right there when we have product issues. They join our staff in analyzing the problem. Is it a semiconductor defect? A flaw in some other component? A difficulty with a product design? They help us identify the root of the difficulty, and if it is a TI problem, they get it fixed quickly.

Emulation and development tools also are part of the TI DSP Solutions approach. When we work in the DSP environment, the logic around it and the memory, we use primarily TI tools. But those tools are quite compatible with other tools that we use to design some of our other basic custom parts.

In Seagate hard disk drives, the DSP is a core building block. But we also insist on the ability to customize around that core to create precisely the solutions that we need. It's that collective solution that gives us cost reductions as well as performance improvements. That's really the package that keeps the TI solution in the forefront and I think it is as significant as the functionality of the DSP core itself.

March 1996, vol. 13, no. 2

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