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Within the familiar exterior of a personal computer, technology is changing rapidly. The hard disk drive (HDD) that holds all of our precious programs and data can now be controlled by a single processor called a digital signal processor (DSP). Replacing the more limited processing elements historically found in drives, these single-chip applications increase HDD capacity and bring down costs.
Texas Instruments (TI), which pioneered the DSP market introducing its first device in 1982, today is the recognized world DSP leader. In fact, 95 percent of the DSPs found in hard disk drives today are manufactured by TI, including those drives produced by Maxtor Corp., one of the most prominent HDD manufacturers.
"Maxtor Corp. recognized TI's leadership in DSP technology, along with its seven years of experience designing chips for HDD, when we were choosing a development partner for our MobileMax™ 171," said Kevin Magenis, Maxtor's vice president of development engineering. The MobileMax is a 171-megabyte PCMCIA Type III HDD that uses a TI digital signal processor as the sole processing element.
"With the MobileMax 171, we wanted to produce a smaller drive for portable computers that would meet the intense capacity demands for running such programs as Windows™ and its various applications that have massive capacity requirements," Magenis said. "TI helped us achieve that goal while allowing us to stay within our targeted system cost."
"The key to squeezing more performance from the same cost is frequently lowering the number of chips required to perform the task," explained Alex Gorjanc, TI's HDD sales director. "Because the single DSP replaces a number of microcontrollers, we cut the cost of drive electronics by 30 percent over previous designs," Gorjanc said.
"Once we achieved a capacity goal that runs Windows and its applications without special data compression, we wanted to take it to market quickly," Magenis said. "As the only high volume manufacturer of DSPs in the industry, TI was the only bidder who could take this kind of technological breakthrough and rapidly turn it into profits through volume production at more than one facility."
Development time for HDD is a scant six months, followed by a short product life cycle of about 18 months. This makes time-to-market a critical issue in the success of new products. "Because TI has its own chip manufacturing facilities, the company was able to move the product from samples to volume production in less than three months," he said.
During the development phase, experienced teams of semiconductor experts from TI were dispatched to meet Maxtor's demands to control power consumption, which extends battery life for host computer systems. This needs to be accomplished while simultaneously increasing HDD storage capacity, integrating additional features and improving durability. With this drive, Maxtor is offering the industry's most durable 1.8-inch HDD. Its average up-time is greater than 300,000 hours.
The final product reduces the chip count to just six integrated circuits. The expanded processing abilities of the uniprocessor solution will allow Maxtor to add more features and develop future designs quickly and easily, as it continues to drive down the cost-per-megabyte.
"Other firms told us they thought they could reach our goals, but TI had people to work on our project who have been designing circuits and writing software for hard disk drives for years," Magenis said. "It's tough to compete with their level of experience and customer support."
The techniques used in Maxtor's HDD DSP solution can be easily transferred to other high-tech applications including cellular telephones, modems and multimedia, as well as other hard disk drives.
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Trademarks:
Mobile Max is a trademark of Maxtor Corporation.
Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
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