Marvell Announces Industry's First Read Channel PHY to Achieve 1.8 GigaHertz Speeds
8/21/2002 - Marvell®, a technology leader in the development of extreme broadband communications solutions, announced the industry's first mixed-signal DSP products to achieve 1.8 GigaHertz speeds. The 88C7500 family of read channel physical layer (PHY) devices will further extend Marvell's five-year market share leadership as a supplier to enterprise-class storage manufacturers. Marvell has sampled the 88C7500 read channel device to all enterprise and selected desktop customers since early June, and has already secured design wins with the Company's long-standing enterprise customers.
"Marvell's latest addition to our read channel product line leads the industry with data rates up to 1.8 billion bits per second — an increase of 50% over our previous record-setting read channel solutions," said Dr. Alan J. Armstrong, Marvell's Vice President of Marketing for the Storage Business Group. "This is truly an impressive technology milestone since these data rates are achieved using a standard 0.13 micron process."
The 88C7500 device enables enterprise storage OEMs to offer the highest performance solutions for systems requiring high transaction throughputs, such as next-generation NAS/SAN and RAID systems. In desktop applications, manufacturers can extend a single architecture platform across several generations of products, increasing their return on R&D investment. In addition, the high data transfer rates allow users to benefit from the available bandwidth of the new Serial ATA interface, and more specifically, from Marvell's Serial ATA product offerings, which boast a data rate of 1.5 Gigabits per second (Gbps). Never before have disk transfer rates been able to truly take advantage of the speeds offered by this new interface. As the Serial ATA interface moves to its second generation at 3.0 Gbps, Marvell's follow-on read channel products, at speeds greater than 2.0 GHz, will continue to offer increased performance gains to end-users.
The 88C7500 read channel incorporates several new advanced features that allow storage manufacturers to reduce costs and time-to-market:
- Self-Servo-Write Support
The 88C7500 read channel incorporates revolutionary Self-Servo-Write technology, which allows the disk drive to write its own servo patterns on the disks during initial manufacturing steps, allowing storage manufacturers to eliminate future capital equipment expenditures for costly servo track writers and to free-up clean-room floor space. The cost savings that come from the elimination of servo track writers is dramatic, as this equipment needs to be replaced often and increases in cost with each generation of equipment. Not only does this technology offer tremendous cost advantages, but it is also required to achieve next-generation storage densities. Marvell's Self-Servo-Write technology greatly increases the accuracy with which tracks can be written onto the hard disk media, doubling the tracks per inch (TPI) and enabling a two-fold increase in storage capacity. - 10-Bit Data Encoding
As storage densities increase and data bits are packed closer together, the current 8-bit data encoding method is falling short of next generation requirements. In response to the requirement for improved error detection and correction, the 88C7500 family includes support for newly developed 10-bit data encoding. Combined with Marvell's highly advanced, industry-leading error correction code (ECC) engine, 10-bit encoding provides significant improvement in error detection and correction capability of the system. This level of improvement is of paramount importance for maintaining data integrity and reliability while continuing to increase storage capacities and reduce costs for the end-user. Marvell's 10-bit data encoding is complementary to both its own hard disk controller as well as that of several key customers. The 88C7500 device also offers support for legacy 8-bit data encoding. - Target MorphingTM Technology
The widespread success of the programmable target technology first introduced in Marvell's 88C5500 family of read channels has created a new standard for read channel functionality. The introduction of the 88C7500 device marks the second generation of Marvell's programmable target architecture. For storage OEMs, this technology enables increased head yields in manufacturing. As storage capacities continue to increase and push the limits of head technology, Marvell's Target Morphing technology can be critical to the cost-effective manufacturing of storage devices.
The result of a three year-long effort with its customers to continue to develop advanced product offerings, the Marvell 88C7500 read channel is designed and manufactured in 0.13-micron CMOS process, and packaged in a 100-pin 14mm x 14mm for enterprise and desktop applications. First sampled in June of this year, the device is the industry's first read channel to be manufactured in 0.13-micron process. The availability of the read channel core in the 0.13-micron process will be key to Marvell's System-on-Chip (SOC) strategy moving forward.
About Marvell (www.marvell.com)
Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) is the leading global semiconductor provider of complete broadband communications solutions for the data communications and storage markets. The Company's diverse product portfolio includes switching, transceiver, communications controller, wireless, and storage solutions that power the entire communications infrastructure, including enterprise, metro, home, and storage networking. As used in this release, the terms "Company" and "Marvell" refer to Marvell Technology Group Ltd. and its subsidiaries, including Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. (MSI), Marvell Asia Pte Ltd (MAPL), Marvell Japan K.K., Marvell Taiwan Ltd., Marvell International Ltd. (MIL), Galileo Technology Ltd., and SysKonnect GmbH. MSI is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and designs, develops and markets products on behalf of MIL and MAPL. MSI may be contacted at (408) 222-2500.
Marvell, the Marvell logo and Target Morphing are trademarks of Marvell.
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