WD Discretly Acquired Disk Controller Business of ST Microelectronics

Here are an abstract of what said WD’s CEO John Coyne during his company’s conference call, commenting 4FQ08 financial results:

"In June, in a further strategic step to accelerate our technology development and deployment, we acquired the hard drive controller IP rights, design tools, and design team from ST Microelectronics. This in-house HDC capability will enhance the efficiencies of our development process with our existing SOC supply partners."

"As you’ve seen over the past five years, as we’ve grown the company and grown the financial resources of the company, we have also in parallel been gathering in the fundamental technology capability to drive the business forward and to improve the fundamental efficiency from an engineering perspective. When you own all of the technology pieces, you can better and more efficiently and more timely put together the optimization of the system, and so we did that with Hedge, we did it with Media, and we’ve now brought HDC controller design and development back into the company again. We’ve had it outside for maybe eight years, I guess, something in that range. So we brought that capability back in house and the objective there is to improve the efficiency so that the HDC core, just like all of our competitors have their own HDC capability, we now have that and therefore all of the firmware that we write to operate that core can now be common across our multiple drive platforms, and can be — we’ll continue to then embed that technology in the SOCs, paired up with the best channel and the best execution with our existing SOC suppliers. So it helps us on efficiency and it helps us on speed."