Advanced Storage Technology Consortium

IDEMA (The International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association), with founding members Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST), Marvell, Seagate Technology, Western Digital and Xyratex, announced the formation of the Advanced Storage Technology Consortium (ASTC).

Open to IDEMA members, ASTC’s purpose is the formation of collaborative joint research initiatives among and between storage industry participants, customers, suppliers, universities and laboratories to harmonize in a common direction on the future of next generation storage technologies. Through an expansion of fundamental research, ASTC will shorten the time from innovation to productization while maintaining a competitive marketplace. Other founding member companies include: LSI, Texas Instruments, Fuji Electric, Heraeus, Intevac, KLA-Tencor and Veeco.

"Successfully addressing commercial and consumer storage demand requires continual technology advancements, and ASTC’s ambitious agenda underscores the new level of maturity in the storage industry," states Mark Geenen, IDEMA’s chairman of its Global Board of Directors. "Significant challenges inherent to future storage technologies have proven too costly, risky, and unmanageable for any single company to pursue alone. The Advanced Storage Technology Consortium will create and direct groundbreaking cooperative research endeavors across the supply chain. These will include (but are not limited to) university level research, common specifications and terminology for new components or manufacturing tools, collaborative working groups on future technologies, and joint development projects," added Geenen.

Utilizing IDEMA’s lean operating structure, members of ASTC will give participants the highest possible level of execution, oversight, cost management, and return on investment. ASTC will also seek financial support from governments and associated laboratories.

There are several critical advantages
to this new approach:

Expanded funding of university research: ASTC will vastly expand investment in university research projects, focusing its multi-million dollar budget on critical areas of next-generation storage technologies.
Direct oversight: industry technical executives and experts will provide leadership on how projects are determined, how projects are scoped, scheduled, executed, and measured; and how funds are administered, including to universities, foundations, or organizations.
Storage industry roadmap: The lack of a storage technology roadmap has resulted in suboptimal supply chain tuning. ASTC will construct and sustain a storage industry roadmap, which will be the property of ASTC member companies.
IDEMA’s global network ensures broad participation: IDEMA’s membership spans the entire value chain to include HDD suppliers, equipment companies, component suppliers, storage device customers, and material vendors. This breadth and depth will give immediate and profound scale and commitment to ASTC.

Comments

Abstracts of FAQs on ASTC as published by IDEMA:

"The Consortium is intended to give participants the highest possible level of engagement and participation in setting and understanding the future directions on key new technologies, such as Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) or Bit Patterned Media (BPM).

"Both technologies - HAMR and BPM - hold promise for driving areal density far beyond about a terabit per square inch, and ultimately, we expect the industry to use both techniques in tandem to drive areal density beyond 10 Tbits/square inch. HAMR and BPM are complementary technologies. A key technical challenge in scaling to higher areal density is the thermal stability of the media. There are two approaches to pushing the thermal limits of the media to higher areal density. One direction is to enable scaling to smaller data bits without having to reduce the physical grains size in the magnetic media. The other is to increase the magnetic stiffness of the media materials. BPM technology addresses the first pathway through intentional patterning of the bits into 'islands’ rather than isolated grains. HAMR addresses how to write higher coercivity media to enable the second pathway. To achieve the highest possible areal densities, both technologies will likely be necessary.

"ASTC and its members are currently evaluating both technologies to assess their respective technical viability and economics. It is still too early in the development stage to make a definitive decision. Clearly the decision will be predicated on both technology viability and the ability for mass production. One key aspect of ASTC will be to prepare suppliers, tool vendors, and customers for mass production capability in parallel with the development of the technology to reduce the time from innovation to products.

"The 'superparamagnetic effect' presents us with a serious challenge. It is compromising our efforts to continue increasing the areal density and storage capacity of our disk drives. Based on a 30% areal density growth rate per year, we anticipate that a new technology will be needed for leading edge areal density products in the 2014 to 2015 timeframe.

"The first priority for the alliance will be to develop data and industry direction on which of the two technologies (HAMR or BPM ) may be implemented first in mass production.

"The group will spawn research proposals and projects working in tandem with universities. ASTC anticipates finalizing its research agenda and holding its first kick-off meeting among the member companies and university researchers in January 2011."