News

posted on 25 July 2008 12:02

Hard disk drive manufacturer Western Digital has bought a hard disk drive controller design team, design tools and design IP from ST Microelectronics. Neither company has said anything about this so far, although the transaction took place last month.

In the latest quarterly results earnings call transcript, WD CEO and president John Coyne said, "In June, in a further strategic step to accelerate our technology development and deployment, we acquired the hard drive controller IP rights, design tools, and design team from STMicroelectronics. This in-house HDC capability will enhance the efficiencies of our development process with our existing SOC (system on chip) supply partners."

WD has been increasing its vertical integration and recently completed the integration of its Komag (disk media manufacturing) acquisition which took place in June last year.

Coyne added this: "When you own all of the technology pieces, you can better and more efficiently and more timely put together the optimization of the system, and so we did that with Hedge, we did it with Media (Komag), and we’ve now brought HDC controller design and development back into the company again. We’ve had it outside for maybe eight years, I guess, something in that range."

"So we brought that capability back in house and the objective there is to improve the efficiency so that the HDC (Hard Drive Controller) core, just like all of our competitors have their own HDC capability, we now have that and therefore all of the firmware that we write to operate that core can now be common across our multiple drive platforms, and can be -- we’ll continue to then embed that technology in the SOCs, paired up with the best channel and the best execution with our existing SOC suppliers. So it helps us on efficiency and it helps us on speed."

ST is the world's fifth-largest semiconductor company. In January this year it announced the L7220 hard-disk drive motor-control chip intended for demanding enterprise-level HDD applications. At the time it claimed it was the market leader in enterprise HDD controllers. ST still lists HDD motor controllers on the products section of its web site.

Coyne also said in the call transcript: "We are also investing in the underlying technology to facilitate entry into our currently un-served market sectors of mainstream enterprise ..."

Clearly and apparently obviously the STM HDD controller operation is essential for that. We can guesstimate with a lot more certainty that WD is going to announce a 2.5-inch SAS drive for enterprise use. A question is 'when?' One analyst thinks it might not be for several quarters with the gaming and automotive markets entered first.

The ST design operation acquisition financial details have not been revealed.

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}