LSI announces industry's first 28nm read channel for HDD manufacturers

MILPITAS, USA: LSI Corp. is demonstrating to OEM customers the TrueStore RC5100 read channel for hard disk drives (HDD). The RC5100 is the industry's first 28nm read channel and features a new low-density parity check (LDPC) iterative decoding architecture, which enables HDD manufacturers to achieve increased areal density, higher yield and lower power consumption for HDDs.

A critical piece of technology for increasing the capacity of hard drives, a read channel translates the magnetically encoded information on the hard disk drive to electronic signals that can be understood by the host computer.

"The amount of digital data being generated worldwide continues to grow at an exponential rate, creating new storage challenges for client and enterprise customers alike," said Phil Brace, senior vice president and general manager, Storage Peripherals Division, LSI. "We pride ourselves on being first to market with new process technology that extends HDD capacity, accelerates performance and provides our HDD OEM customers with a time-to-market advantage."

The RC5100 is designed to support notebook, desktop and enterprise HDDs. It supports low power management features, which are critical to extending battery life in notebooks and to reducing energy costs in datacenters. The RC5100 also supports advanced new technologies such as shingled magnetic recording (SMR), a key technology for achieving next-generation areal density points.

"LSI has a consistent history of innovation," said Rick Cassidy, president of TSMC North America. "This 28nm collaboration with TSMC is a continuation of that proud lineage."

The RC5100 is the latest addition to the LSI TrueStore family of ICs for hard disk, solid-state disk and tape devices, including highly integrated storage system-on-a-chip (SoC), read channels, preamplifiers, serial PHYs and hard disk drive controller IP. Together with TrueStore preamplifiers and serial PHYs, the RC5100 creates a complete data path solution for HDD manufacturers.

The TrueStore RC5100 is expected to be available to OEM customers in the first calendar quarter of 2012.