Where IBM Storage is Headed
This series of articles proves to me 'the handwriting is on the wall'. The big Co's don't make a move like this unless there is a strategic plan in place. This also confirms the prevailing notion that miniaturization keeps adding more value and lowering costs. You'll be seeing this nano-tech storage in 3 to 5 years at the consumer level.
This from April 2002:
IBM Sells Hard Drive Business
4/17/2002
Sells Assets to Hitachi
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that IBM is selling 70% of its hard drive business to Hitachi for a rumored $1 Billion.
IBM pioneered the technology back in the 50s and has continued to make interesting innovations over the last few years, such as the IBM Microdrive (a kcgeek crowd favorite). Sadly, during the last couple of years IBM's HDD quality has gone down at a ridiculous rate, with countless numbers of IBM DeskStars succumbing to critical failures, causing many to redub them 'DeathStars'.
It is unknown at this time what has spurred the decision, although it is no secret that Big Blue is moving away from the component business. It is also possible that the poor quality is a factor, as well, as IBM is known for vigorously protecting their brand name's image of quality.
'Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM' sounds a lot less reassuring when you append 'but their data might be gone forever' to it.
This from May, 2002:
IBM Details Possible Silicon Successor
May 20, 2002
IBM Researchers say they have passed another milestone regarding research into carbon-based transistors that could pave the way for their replacement of silicon transistors in computers.
In an article to appear in the May 20 issue of the scientific journal Applied Physics Letters, the IBM research team detail their work with carbon nanotubes (CNTs) -- tube-shaped molecules made of carbon atoms that are 50,000 times thinner than a human hair. They write that the carbon-based prototypes outperformed the leading silicon transistor prototypes available today.
The researchers said the nanotube transistors they created produce more than twice the speed of electrical currents compared to top-performing silicon transistor prototypes.
The research is detailed in an article entitled "Vertical Scaling of Carbon Nanotube Field-Effect Transistors Using Top Gate Electrodes" by Shalom Wind, Joerg Appenzeller, Richard Martel, Vincent Derycke and Phaedon Avouris of IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
Although commercial prototypes of the carbon nanotubes could be as many as 10 years away, the research suggests that the nanotubes could be forerunners of new transistors to replace silicon, as the clock on Moore's Law ticks off. When Gordon Moore, one of the co-counders of Intel, predicted that the amount of data that could be stored on silicon would double every every 18 months, Microchip experts also accepted that the law's days would be numbered.
"Carbon nanotubes are already the top candidate to replace silicon when current chip features just can't be made any smaller, a physical barrier expected to occur in about 10 to 15 years," said Dr. Phaedon Avouris, manager of nanoscale science, IBM Research.
"Proving that carbon nanotubes outperform silicon transistors opens the door for more research related to the commercial viability of nanotubes."
This from June, 2002:
IBM Sells Hard Disk Drive Biz; Cuts Staff
June 4, 2002
Following the $2.05 billion agreement to sell the money-losing hard disk drive (HDD) operations to Hitachi (NYSE:HIT), Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM (NYSE:IBM) on Tuesday announced it would lay off 1,500 employees from its Microelectronics Division, a move aimed at increasing operational efficiencies.
The layoffs, which accounts for about 7.5 percent of the unit's work force, follows an earlier announcement that Hitachi would shell out $2.05 billion for the bulk of IBM's HDD-related assets. Initially, the Japanese electronics behemoth would own 70 percent of the new company and make a series of fixed payments to IBM before taking full ownership after three years.
As a result of all of the staff cuts, Big Blue said it would take a pre-tax charge of approximately $2 billion to $2.5 billion, primarily in the second quarter. "These include charges associated with the company's exit from the hard disk drive business, write-offs of assets in the Microelectronics business, and charges related to productivity initiatives, principally workforce reduction," IBM said in a statement.
IBM and Hitachi had earlier confirmed the fleshing out of an earlier agreement to merge the hard disk drive (HDD) operations into a new standalone joint venture.
The merged company, to be managed by an independent team of executives from Hitachi and IBM's existing HDD operations, would be based in San Jose, Calif.
Corporate managing director of Hitachi Dr. Jun Naruse has been tapped as CEO for the new company with IBM's Douglas Grose to serve as chief operating officer. Grose is currently general manager of IBM's Storage Technology Division.
Hitachi gets to select the new company's board of directors, and IBM will not be involved in its operations.
The companies said the new organization would employ about 24,000 -- 18,000 from IBM and 6,000 from Hitachi -- with major manufacturing operations at 11 locations around the world.
Hitachi estimates the new company would account for approximately $5 billion in sales in fiscal year 2003, and will target annual sales of $7 billion by fiscal year 2006. "IBM and Hitachi have each agreed to multi-year HDD supply commitments from the new company," it added.
In addition to the consummation of the HDD deal, IBM and Hitachi are proceeding with separate negotiations related to a planned multi-year alliance to research and develop new open standards-based technologies specific to next-generation storage networks and systems. IBM and Hitachi trail market leader EMC (NYSE:EMC) in the storage networking space.
"The companies have created a process to review joint projects designed to improve interoperability, reduce complexity and improve cost of ownership for storage systems customers. Additional information on this alliance will be announced when negotiations are finalized," IBM said.
Separately, IBM announced a new business unit to provide a wide range of design services for manufacturers of information systems, networking gear and consumer electronic products.
The company said the new unit will target OEM customers looking to reduce cost, time-to-market and complexity from designing systems internally. It also will help them take advantate of the the latest technologies and integrate hardware and software from existing IBM organizations.
"We estimate the opportunity for providing these enhanced services could grow to nearly $6 billion within the next five years," said Patrick Toole, general manager of the new services unit.
The unit would be set up within IBM's Technology Group and would offer services including design, test, certification, prototyping and manufacturing for chips, cards, boards and systems. IBM said OEM customers could use the services to facilitate and expedite everything from chip design, to component fabrication, to card and board assembly, to complete outsourcing of all aspects of design and manufacturing for subsystems and systems.
"IBM initially will concentrate its design services on the communications and consumer sectors of the IT industry. Its goal is to expand into other areas such as storage systems, server, automotive, medical, defense and aerospace," the company said.
This from June, 2002:
IBM Ties Nanotechology to Storage
June 11, 2002
IBM (NYSE:IBM) Tuesday revealed another experiment from one of its many laboratories this year. Using aspects of an increasingly popular trend in the high-tech sector called nanotechnology , the Armonk, N.Y. concern has demonstrated a data storage density of a trillion bits per square inch, which is some 20 times higher than the densest magnetic storage currently offered.
The achievement was made under the aegis of a research project called "Millipede." To get an idea of just how encompassing the storage achievement is, Big Blue estimated that Millipede is dense enough to house 25 million printed textbook pages on a surface the size of a postage stamp. This is significant because the technology may boost the storage capacity of handheld devices -- personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cell phones -- often criticized for their low storage capabilities.
How is it possible for Millipede to be so dense? Millipede uses thousands of nano-sharp tips to punch indentations representing individual bits into a thin plastic film. The result is akin to a nanotech version of the data processing 'punch card', but with key differences. First, Millipede is re-writeable, meaning it may be used over and over. Second, it may be able to store more than 3 billion bits of data in the space occupied by just one hole in a standard punch card.
And IBM is concentrating on making Millipede even more dense. The terabit demonstration employed a single "nano-tip "making indentations only 10 nanometers (millionth of a millimeter) in diameter. IBM's research team is now building a prototype that deploys more than 4,000 tips working simultaneously over a 7 mm-square field. This would enable a high-capacity data storage system to be packed into the smallest format used now for flash memory.
"The Millipede project could bring tremendous data capacity to mobile devices such as personal digital assistants, cellular phones, and multifunctional watches," says Peter Vettiger, Millipede project leader. "In addition, we are also exploring the use of this concept in a variety of other applications, such as large-area microscopic imaging, nanoscale lithography or atomic and molecular manipulation."
For those interested in the technical specifications, read on.
Millipede consists of a two-dimensional array of v-shaped silicon cantilevers that are 0.5 micrometers thick and 70 micrometers long. At the end of each cantilever is a tip less than 2 micrometers long. The current experimental setup contains a 3 mm by 3 mm array of 1,024 cantilevers, which are created by silicon surface micromachining. Time-multiplexed electronics, similar to that used in DRAM chips, address each tip individually for parallel operation. Electromagnetic actuation moves the storage medium beneath the array in both the x- and y-directions, enabling each tip to read and write within its own storage field of 100 micrometers on a side.
How does the device function? To ensure the tips writes or erases, etc., they are brought into contact with a thin polymer film coating a silicon substrate only a few nanometers thick. Bits are written by heating a resistor built into the cantilever to a temperature of typically 400 degrees Celsius. The hot tip softens the polymer and sinks into it, generating an indentation. For reading, the resistor is operated at lower temperature, such as 300 degrees Celsius, which does not soften the polymer. When the tip drops into an indentation, the resistor is cooled by the resulting better heat transport, and a measurable change in resistance occurs.
In IBM's ongoing interest in cutting power consumption in the industry, how much power is used depends on the data rate at which the device is operated. When operated at data rates of a few megabits per second, Millipede is expected to consume about 100 milliwatts, which is in the range of flash memory technology and considerably below magnetic or electronic recording, which are the more traditional means of storage.
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