NEC teamed up with American electronic re entered the hard disk chip market

NEC and Link A Media electronic Devices company to establish partnership for the next generation of perpendicular recording hard disk drive development system on chip (SoC). The first product will be listed next summer. NEC said it has invested $8 million to the United States Link A Media, becoming a shareholder of the company holding 16.7% of California. This will allow NEC to re-enter the hard disk chip market.

Both sides said they will read A channel Link Media company (read channel), IP module 90 nm process and standard error correction encoding and data recovery technology and NEC combined, developed for hard disk SoC. This chip will be produced in NEC Electronics Yamagata 300mm plant. Link A Media will sell the chip to OEM.

According to Link A, founder and CEO of Hemant Thapar, the two sides will initially focus on 2.5 and 1.8 Inch hard drive chips for mobile applications. Target density is 150 180gigabit per inch. The two companies are expected to reach about $90 million in sales in the first year, hoping to have a share of around of hard disk IC in 2010. Yamaguchi said it would require 5000 300mm wafers per month.

Thapar worked with IBM and DataPath Systems to develop a number of new hard disk signal processing technologies, including PRML (Partial Response Likelihood), Extended PRML and Generalized PRML. NEC and Thapar have more than 10 years of cooperation, when Thapar or DataPath's CEO.