Agere Systems is throwing its weight behind the hard disk drive (HDD) market. The Allentown, Pa.-based chipmaker, which records about one-third of its revenue from storage, introduced a new chip today specifically targeting the consumer electronics portables market driven by video.

In unveiling its SC1200, the company is countering other industry opinions that flash memory will be the preferred storage medium in the CE portables world. The market is a high opportunity area for storage -- a CE segment that is expected to see a 42 percent compound annual growth rate from 2004 to 2008 -- as MP3 player users demand more songs, camera phones gain more functionality and storage hungry video playing/recording becomes integrated into handheld devices.

“If you looked at hard drives and flash devices, hard drives are basically in the lead in terms of the dollar per gigabyte,” Duncan Furness, senior product manager at Agere, said. “This device helps enable the hard drives to continue to win that battle.” Agere estimates HDD storage is about three times to four times less than flash, which is about $45 a gigabyte.

However, one advantage Agere agrees flash has over HDD is size. To offset that, the SOC relies on perpendicular recording techniques to increase storage space in thumbprint-sized drives, allowing portable media products to expand beyond digital music to incorporate video and other high-capacity files that require multiple gigabytes of storage.

The perpendicular method of recording is catching on in the CE world as an alterative to longitudinal recording, a common means of digital recording on magnetic material that lays the bits out end to end. Both Hitachi and Toshiba use perpendicular recording -- which, instead, aligns data bits at 90 degrees to the plane of the recording medium -- and have made recent announcements claiming more storage availability in less space for HDDs based on the technique. In April, Hitachi's hard disk division pushed real density to 230Gbit per square inch, and said perpendicular recording could lead to 1-inch drives with 20GByte of storage within two years. And in August, Toshiba announced shipment of a 1.8-inch HDD that allows up to 10,000 songs or 25,000 photos on a single 40GByte platter.

Agere’s SC1200 aims at 0.85-inch, 1-inch and 1.8-inch HDDs and, a member of the company’s TrueStore CE family, offers a 30 percent reduction in die size compared to previous generation Agere SOC design. At 1 inch, Agere claims the SOC can allow more than 12GBytes of storage, about three times current flash.

While 1-inch HDDs are the most popular today, IDC expects sales of the three sizes combined will grow from 17 million units in 2004 to more than 149 million units in 2009, a 53 percent compound annual growth rate.