May 22, 2006 – STMicroelectronics is developing a new hard disk drive (HDD) system-on-chip device integrating its own design and manufacturing capabilities using 90nm process technologies. Functional silicon, sourced from the Crolles2 Alliance 300mm facility in France (a R&D partnership involving ST, Philips, and Freescale), is currently being evaluated and tested.

The device, based on ST’s Tintoretto read-write channel architecture, integrates ST’s T90 Read Channel IP in the hard disk controller, the read channel, serial ATA interface (SATA) and memory. The T90 supports data rates ranging from 0.3-1.7 Gbit/sec, for 2.5-in and 3.5-in disk drives used in mobile, desktop computers, and servers. The controller incorporates a 32-bit CPU core running at 450MHz.

Last year ST announced its fabrication of the multi-interface PHY physical layer in 90nm. The macro-cell provides the high-speed SATA interface in the new chip, and can also support applications using the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Fiber Channel, and PCI Express serial interface standards.