Neil Robinson, ARM, Inc., Marketing
Manager, Worldwide Storage
Future
portable consumer products with HDD
Abstract
Portable devices with HDD storage need to be cheaper,
smaller and have a longer battery life to meet the demands of consumers and
make it to the high volume market. Shrinking the traditional HDD design is
a short-term solution for this emerging market today. For the longer term the
HDD design and functionality must be developed for these consumer products
and optimized for their new requirements.
To simultaneously address the size, cost and power
consumption needs, the level of integration in the end product has to
increase. This is a simple concept but the solution must still allow for
the CE OEMs to choose from multiple suppliers with minimal change to their
design at both the hardware and software levels. In addition, any long-term
solution must enable the CE OEMs to develop independently of their
suppliers should they wish to do so.
I propose a route to integrated solutions that
provide applications processing bandwidth to the CE OEM on the same silicon as
today's integrated HDC through the addition of an applications sub-system with
standard hardware and software interfaces. This will result in system cost,
power consumption and size reductions through the removal of i) the discrete
applications processor found in today's products; ii) the off-chip
interface to the HDD and iii) the associated support logic and board real
estate. Power consumption is further improved through simplified and reduced buffering
requirements as well as the removal of the HDD interface, a whole applications
chip and its support. It is important to note that the cost of the HDD
itself may increase, but the system level savings will more than compensate for
this.
Biography
Neil Robinson is a technical Marketing Manager with ARM, Inc
where he has worldwide responsibility for growing ARM’s market share in its
Storage segment by ensuring that ARM technologies are aligned with the needs of
HDD, Optical and Flash storage OEMs.
Neil has held many positions within ARM over his 12 years there,
including software development, chip validation, ASIC project management, FAE,
Product Management and Sales. His most recent role was preceded by a focus on
Consumer Entertainment products and brings that experience to the storage
industry. Neil holds a BSc in Physics from Imperial College, University of
London and is an Associate of the Royal College of Science, Technology and
Medicine. Neil can be reached at Neil.Robinson@arm.com