SGS-Thompson Microelectronics NV and San Jose, California-based Exar Corp, which supplies mixed signal applications-specific circuits, have announced a three-year joint development agreement to produce a family of highly-integrated, high-performance BiCMOS read channel circuits for 3.5 hard disk drives and below: the first of these products is being tested at the moment and is targeted at applications that require a data rate of 12M-bytes to 33M-bytes per second; the read channel segment of the disk drive has a mixed signal circuit system that comprises pulse detection, data separation, active filtering and frequency synthesis functions; the device was designed using an SGS-Thompson proprietary 1.2 micron BiCMOS process, and total power consumption, with all blocks active, will be less than 500mW from a 5V supply; other products in the design phase will come out late this year or early next.
