White PapersHard disk drives with multiple, single platter HDAs and one or two read/write heads would speed I/O and enable automated backup of data.
Reasons parallel-transfer Hard Disk Drives (pHDDs) Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Document Version 3.5 by Phil White ECC Technologies, Inc. (ECC Tek) 4750 Coventry Road East Minnetonka, MN 55345-3909 Web: www.ecctek.com E-Mail: phil.white@ecctek.com Phone: 952-935-2885 Fax: 952-935-2491 Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 2 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com Notice No information in this document is considered to be confidential or proprietary to ECC Technologies, Inc. ( ECC Tek ). Any person anywhere in the world may freely copy and distribute this document without any limitations whatsoever or without any obligations whatsoever to ECC Tek. Philip E. White President ECC Technologies, Inc. ( ECC Tek ) 4750 Coventry Road East Minnetonka, MN 55345-3909 Web: www.ecctek.com Phone: 952-935-2885 Fax: 952-935-2491 E-Mail: phil.white@ecctek.com Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 3 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com Revision History 03-06-04 pew Made some minor editing changes. 03-09-04 pew Made some minor editing changes. 03-10-04 pew Made some minor editing changes. 03-15-04 pew Made some minor editing changes. 03-17-04 pew Inserted 3 additional Figures. 03-19-04 pew Corrected the Watts per GigaByte Figures. 03-20-04 pew Replaced Figures 1-4 with disk diameter on the x axis. 08-16-04 pew Updated Figure 5 to indicate price crossover points and edited the text to refer to the price crossover points. 06-28-05 pew Changed the acronym PHDD to pHDD to be consistent with current ECC Tek nomenclature. 02-13-06 pew Replaced the term tiny-dumb drive with head-disk assembly and TDD with HDA. Added a section on pHDD pricing strategy and made a few other changes. 02-13-06 pew Made some minor corrections. 03-06-06 pew Reorganized the material and created v3.0. 03-06-06 pew Corrected minor errors and created v3.1. 03-07-06 pew Corrected minor errors and created v3.2. 03-20-06 pew Added additional material and created v3.3 03-22-06 pew Deleted some material and created v3.4 03-23-06 pew Added some material and created v3.5 Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 4 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com Sections 1. Executive Summary ...................................................................................................6 2. What Seagate Would Receive If Seagate Purchased ECC Technologies, Inc. (ECC Tek) ..................................................................................................................7 3. Size of the Disks used in a pHDD Product ................................................................7 4. The pHDD Price Issue................................................................................................8 5. pHDD Pricing Strategy ............................................................................................11 6. Today s Buyers.........................................................................................................11 7. The pHDD Downward Cost Spiral ..........................................................................12 8. Could a pHDD Ever Cost Less Than an HDD?.......................................................13 9. Are Buyers Willing to Pay a Premium for a pHDD?...............................................13 10. Human Factors .........................................................................................................14 11. The Value of Data or Content ..................................................................................14 12. Disk Drive Companies Competing Against Their Customers .................................14 13. Comparing pHDDs to Previous parallel-transfer HDDs..........................................15 14. Reasons for Developing pHDD Products that use Tiny HDAs................................15 15. Performance Reasons for Developing pHDD Products ...........................................22 16. Performance Reasons to Develop pHDD Arrays.....................................................23 17. Failure and Fault Tolerance Reasons for Developing pHDD Products ...................24 18. Reasons for Developing pHDD Products Related to Manufacturing.......................24 19. Reasons for Developing pHDD Products Based on More Effective Use of Media and More Profit Potential..............................................................................25 20. Reasons for Developing pHDD Products Related to Users Experience.................25 21. Migration of Technology from Supercomputers to PCs ..........................................26 22. If Not Now, When? ..................................................................................................26 23. If Not Seagate, Who? ...............................................................................................27 24. How Will Anyone Know if a pHDD is a Viable Product if No Company Will Ever Develop One? ..................................................................................................27 25. A pHDD is not the Same as a Conventional RAID System.....................................27 26. Legal Issues Regarding ECC Tek Licensing IP.......................................................28 27. IP Landmines............................................................................................................29 28. PRS ECC IP Available from ECC Tek Only ...........................................................29 29. ECC Tek has Set the Standard in Space...................................................................30 30. Endorsements ...........................................................................................................30 30.1. Endorsements for ECC Technologies, Inc. ("ECC Tek") ..................................30 30.2. Endorsements for Phil White .............................................................................32 30.3. Endorsement for the pHDD Concept .................................................................32 Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 5 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com Figures Figure 1 GigaBytes per Cubic Inch as a Function of Disk Diameter .............................16 Figure 2 Watts per GigaByte as a Function of Disk Diameter .......................................17 Figure 3 GigaBytes per Cubic Inch with Speculation about Smaller Drives .................18 Figure 4 Watts per GigaByte with Speculation about Smaller Disks.............................19 Figure 5 HDD Dollars per GigaByte Prices as a Function of Time ...............................20 Figure 6 Performance of HDD Arrays Compared to Performance of pHDD Arrays.....23 Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 6 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com 1. Executive Summary ECC Tek proposes that the disk drive industry develop an entirely new class of disk storage products called parallel-transfer Hard Disk Drives (pHDDs). pHDDs would have much higher transfer rates than conventional HDDs and a variable level of automatic, built-in backup. pHDDs would contain a number of Head-Disk Assemblies (HDAs) and a custom controller chip as components. All of the HDAs in a pHDD would be written and read simultaneously. The disks within all of the HDAs would be synchronized so that a pHDD would appear to be a conventional HDD but with higher performance and automatic, built-in backup which is impossible in a conventional HDD. To summarize, ECC Tek believes pHDDs should be developed into commercial products for the following reasons: " pHDDs could significantly increase revenues and profits at disk drive companies because fewer types of components would need to be manufactured, fewer employees would be needed, and a higher percentage of manufactured media could be used in pHDD products than can be used in conventional HDDs because of the increased power of the ECC system used in pHDDs. " pHDDs would have much higher transfer rates and a much higher overall performance than conventional HDDs. " pHDDs would have automatic, built-in backup eliminating the expense, nuisance and need for RAID controller boards, extra drives and backup software. " pHDDs which use tiny HDAs as components would have higher performance, consume less space and less power than equivalent capacity conventional HDDs. " pHDDs would enable disk drive companies to make many unique types of pHDD models while only manufacturing a few types of HDAs increasing economies of scale and driving down the cost of HDAs. " pHDDs would allow the use of media that is unusable in conventional HDDs because the pHDD ECC system operates on a two dimensional array of data instead of a one dimensional array as is done in conventional HDDs. " pHDDs have features that are highly desirable and commercially valuable but impossible with conventional HDDs. " pHDDs have more commercial value than conventional HDDs and therefore they can be priced higher and offer more profit potential than conventional HDDs. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 7 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com 2. What Seagate Would Receive If Seagate Purchased ECC Technologies, Inc. (ECC Tek) If Seagate purchased ECC Technologies, Inc. (ECC Tek), Seagate would receive the following things: (1) Ownership of US Patent Number 5,754,563 (the PRS Patent) which does not expire until 2015. Ownership of the PRS patent would allow Seagate to prevent all of Seagate's competitors from making, using and selling PRS designs in the US until 2015. If pHDD products were developed by Seagate, for example, then Seagate could stop its competitors from making, using or selling pHDD products in the US until 2015 or Seagate could license the PRS Patent to its competitors and receive licensing fees as additional revenue. (2) Ownership of all of the ECC designs, C code, Verilog code and documentation ECC Tek has developed and licensed to date for 8 customers. (3) Future royalties from two licensees. (4) No ongoing obligations because ECC Tek only agrees to maintain its designs for 1 year and all of those obligations have been fulfilled. The RS ECC designs Seagate would acquire would include the following: (1) Ultra high performance parallel RS (PRS) encoders and decoders that can be used in pHDD products or any other parallel communications or storage products to create an arbitrary level of built-in backup or fault tolerance. These PRS designs have been licensed to NASA, Raytheon, and others to create fault-tolerant synchronous DRAM memories for space and are the de facto standard for use in space for this application. (2) Conventional RS designs as are used in hard disk drives and for NAND Flash. (3) Programmable RS designs that allow the number of errors corrected and the block length to be changed on-the-fly in hardware. As a bonus, if the price is right, Seagate would also receive ownership of all the IP developed by ECC Tek and Phil White related to a new type of dc motor and passive magnetic bearings. This IP has been carefully documented to establish dates of invention, kept confidential and is almost certainly patentable. 3. Size of the Disks used in a pHDD Product pHDDs can use HDAs with any size disks. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 8 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com A disk manufacturer could develop a 3.5 inch pHDD product, a 2.5 inch pHDD product, a 1.8 inch pHDD product and/or a 1 inch pHDD product. The primary differences between pHDD products would be in their physical size, storage capacity, power consumption and price. A 3.5 inch pHDD product would use 3.5 inch HDAs as the storage components, a 2.5 inch pHDD product would use a 2.5 inch HDAs as the storage components, etc. 4. The pHDD Price Issue pHDDs have not yet been developed primarily because, in the past, many people in the disk industry believed the prices of pHDDs would be too high compared to the prices of conventional HDDs of the same capacity and that, because of their high price, no one would buy them. It is important that the pHDD price issue be immediately addressed and understood so that it does not continue to prevent pHDDs from being developed into commercial products. The pHDD price issue is not a simple issue, and it is not quickly or easily understood. Understanding the issue requires careful analysis. Let s start our analysis by looking at 3.5 inch pHDDs compared to equivalent capacity 3.5 inch HDDs. For large capacity 3.5 inch pHDDs without built-in backup, there will only be a relatively small difference in cost between a 3.5 inch pHDD that uses 3.5 inch HDAs and an equal capacity 3.5 inch HDD for the following reasons: " The number of disks, number of heads, and number of preamps will be the same. " More actuators and motors are used by the pHDD, but they are much smaller and the manufacturing volume will be many times what it is for conventional HDD actuators and motors so the price difference should not be large. " All of the digital electronics to control all of the HDAs in a pHDD will be integrated into one pHDD controller chip which should not cost significantly more than the electronics in one HDD. The above assertions are most likely true for 2.5 inch and 1.8 inch pHDDs also, but the time has probably not yet come where the statements are true for 1 inch and .85 inch disks. 3.5 inch, 2.5 inch and probably 1.8 inch, large capacity pHDDs without built-in backup should not cost significantly more than large capacity 3.5 inch, 2.5 inch and 1.8 inch HDDs. These facts imply that maybe larger diameter pHDDs should be developed first, but there does not appear to be any concrete evidence to support the notion that larger diameter pHDDs are too expensive to be viable products. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 9 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com Even if pHDDs cost significantly more than equal capacity conventional HDDs, there are valid reasons why they still can be viable products as explained in the following paragraphs. All readers should agree that the commercial value of any item is the amount of money potential buyers are willing to pay for that item. All readers should also agree that the price of pHDDs could decrease significantly and rapidly with manufacturing maturity and manufacturing volume because of the very large economies of scale involved in manufacturing the HDAs. For discussion purposes, consider a 300 GigaByte HDD that costs 300 and a 300 GigaByte pHDD that costs 500 200 dollars more. Since actual manufacturing costs are confidential information, this is only a guess as to what actual costs would be. The question that we need to answer is, would potential buyers be willing to pay 200 extra to get a pHDD with automatic, built-in backup and higher performance in place of a conventional HDD? The answer to that question is not obvious, but there is a significant amount of evidence to suggest that the answer is more likely to be yes than no . Commercial value is a subjective thing like beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and commercial value is in the mind of the buyer. Some buyers are willing to pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for baseball cards or rare coins. To those buyers, those items have a very high commercial value while to other buyers, they may have no value at all. Speaking for myself and for Jay Seaver (former VP of Advanced Technology at Maxtor), an ultra-high-performance, fail-safe hard drive would easily be worth at least a few hundred dollars more than a conventional HDD. We would gladly pay a few hundred dollars extra to buy a computer that had a fail-safe hard drive in it with automatic, built-in backup so we would not have to do the following things: " We would not have to know anything about RAID or even what the RAID acronym stands for. " We would not have to worry about losing valuable data that took us a long time to create and organize. " We would not have to go buy extra drives and a RAID controller board. " We would not have to spend time and effort to learn how to install new hardware. " We would not have to install the RAID controller board and extra drives. " We would not have to buy backup software. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 10 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com " We would not have to spend time and effort to learn how to install new software. " We would not have to install any extra backup software. " We would not have to spend time and effort to get it all to work properly together. " We would not have to learn how use it. " We would not have to remember to backup our data regularly or after any existing file is modified or after any new file is created. " We would not have to do anything at all to insure all of our data was backed up all of the time automatically. Since I am sure Jay and I are very much like many other people, it is reasonable to believe that a very high percentage of other potential computer buyers would also be willing to pay a few hundred dollars extra to get a computer with a fail-safe hard drive. For most applications pHDDs will have a much higher performance/price ratio than conventional HDDs. That is, they will be able to serve more information in a unit of time than a conventional HDD of the same capacity so they are intrinsically more valuable than conventional HDDs in the same way that a waiter in a restaurant that can serve 100 customers in an hour is more valuable than a waiter that can only serve 10 customers in an hour. In the past, a common misconception existed in the disk drive industry that a pHDD must cost less than a conventional HDD of the same capacity in order for it to be an economically viable product, but that belief is simply not true. Even if pHDDs cost more than conventional HDDs of the same capacity, they still can be economically viable products as long as the extra performance and fault-tolerance benefits gained by using a pHDD are perceived by potential buyers as being worth at least as much as the price difference. Many buyers of PC systems, for example, do not hesitate to pay several hundred dollars more for a PC with the fastest possible processor. Intel charges less than 100 for their slowest processors and over 600 for their fastest processors. Buyers have proven that they believe the extra performance provided by Intel s fastest processors is worth a premium of several hundred dollars. It is reasonable to believe that buyers of pHDD products will also believe the extra performance and fault tolerance provided by a pHDD is worth a few hundred dollars premium. Based on the above facts, there does not appear to be any justifiable reason for anyone to prevent pHDDs from being developed because they may initially cost more than conventional HDDs of the same capacity. If potential buyers are willing to buy pHDD products, then it seems reasonable to expect that potential pHDD manufacturers should be willing to manufacture them so everyone will benefit. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 11 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com 5. pHDD Pricing Strategy The price of a pHDD product should be based on its features and those features should be priced on a feature by feature basis which justifies the fact that a pHDD will probably initially cost more than a conventional HDD. For example, suppose you went to buy a new PC and were told about two PCs that had exactly the same performance but that one of the PCs took 1.5 minutes to boot-up and the other one took only 10 seconds to boot-up. What would the "fast boot-up feature" be worth? Most people would gladly pay 100 to 150 more to get the fast boot-up feature. The fast boot-up PC should also be noticeably faster at running application programs especially ones that require large file transfers like transferring pictures or video. A certain amount of money could be added to a price of a PC if it has a "fast file transfer feature". Then there is the "automatic, built-in backup feature". That feature should be priced based upon the amount of backup that is built-in. For example, a pHDD that allows one HDA to fail may add an additional 200 to the price, one that allows two HDAs to fail might be priced at 300 more and one that tolerates three HDA failures might be priced at 400 more. Each feature should be priced individually. Pricing each feature individually makes good sense and is reasonable. That's what is done with automobiles. When you buy a car, you pay for each accessory or feature individually. When you buy a PC with a conventional HDD, you do not have the option of adding those features, but when you buy a PC with a pHDD you do. It would be easy to justify a pHDD price that is substantially higher than an equivalent capacity HDD price. The extra price is due to the added features. This is a perfectly reasonable, rational, logical and fair pricing strategy. Most people are alike, and they would gladly pay a significant premium to get the added features that a pHDD can provide and an HDD cannot. 6. Today s Buyers It is important to realize that today's buyers are willing to pay whatever it costs to get what they want even if they can't afford it or if the items are overpriced. Here are some examples: Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 12 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com The iPod. The iPod costs hundreds of dollars while low cost music players are available for less than 20, yet buyers buy them by the millions because they are cool. Even teenagers who can't afford them somehow scrape up the money to buy them. Cell phones. The biggest market for cell phones is probably teenagers who can't afford them but must have them and find the money to buy them. SUVs. SUVs are expensive items that the younger generation must have and are willing to buy even though they are expensive and the cost for gas is astronomical. Coffee. People regularly pay more for a cup of coffee at coffee shops today than they used to pay for an entire pound of coffee that would probably have made a hundred cups of coffee. When I worked at Seagate, I bought a Mr. Coffee coffeemaker and charged 5 cents per cup. It was a profitable business at 5 cents a cup so you can imagine what the profit margin could be at Starbucks, Caribou Coffee, Dunn Brothers, etc. Those companies look at the fact that people are willing to pay a high price for coffee at a coffee shop as an opportunity for them to make large profits. Rather than looking at the price of a pHDD as a negative, it should be looked at as being a positive. It offers disk drive companies the opportunity to price an item higher and make more profit. If cost was the only factor involved in making buying decisions, there would be no market for Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Rolls Royces, Jaguars, multi-million dollar houses, leather coats, jewelry, etc. and on and on. Many buyers are willing to pay high prices for those items because of the perceived benefits of owning those things. The same will be true of pHDD products. pHDDs should initially be thought about more as luxury items than as commodities. 7. The pHDD Downward Cost Spiral There is a cause and effect cycle as follows: Once pHDD products start to sell, there will be a large increase in the manufacturing volume of single disk HDAs, which will cause the costs of HDAs to go down, which will allow the price of pHDDs to be reduced, which will cause more pHDDs to be sold. This cycle will repeat with time and can be thought of as a downward spiral. As manufacturing volumes of pHDDs increase, costs and prices will continually decrease. One factor that affects the extent of the cost and price drops is the number of HDAs that are in a pHDD. A high number of HDAs in a pHDD will cause a fast downward cost spiral with a very large cost and price drop. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 13 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com The most important thing to see is that the early adopters will pay the highest prices for pHDDs, but, once they start to take off in the marketplace, prices will drop very rapidly and potentially very far. Nobody knows how far, but it is possible that prices could drop as low as conventional HDD prices or even lower than conventional HDD prices given enough time and high enough volumes. It is very important to take the pHDD downward cost spiral into consideration when deciding whether or not to develop a pHDD product. In other words, disk drive manufacturers must think about what will happen in the future if large numbers of pHDDs start selling. 8. Could a pHDD Ever Cost Less Than an HDD? Yes, it's possible. Consider a pHDD with many HDAs as components and a fair amount of fault tolerance. Disks or HDAs that do not pass the tests for use in HDDs because of too many errors can be used in pHDDs. The cost of the HDAs or disks could be 0 or even a negative number. The cost would be a negative number if it costs money to dispose of unusable disks or HDAs. HDAs do not have to be tested before installing them in pHDDs because the pHDD will automatically know which ones are bad and which ones have lots of errors. The pHDD controller chip can have built-in logic to test pHDDs that use untested HDAs. The cost of testing HDAs can be eliminated. Once pHDDs with a large number of HDAs start selling in large volumes, HDA volumes will be N times the pHDD volumes and costs will start to come down very rapidly due to the downward cost spiral. Because of these factors, it is possible that pHDDs could one day cost less than HDDs. When that happens, HDDs will become obsolete for the same reasons that 14" HDDs are now obsolete. There would be no valid reason to buy an HDD over a pHDD. 9. Are Buyers Willing to Pay a Premium for a pHDD? All of the people I have asked have said they would gladly pay a few hundred dollars extra to get a fail-safe hard drive with automatic, built-in backup. A survey of potential buyers should be done to see what they say. It is almost certain that many people would gladly pay a significant premium to get a fail-safe hard drive. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 14 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com 10. Human Factors It is important to take into consideration a number of human factors when trying to determine whether or not it makes sense to develop a pHDD product. When Carl Ledbetter was the CEO of the supercomputer company ETA in St. Paul, MN, he spoke at the University of Minnesota and said he bought a printer for his grandmother, and she was amazed at how fast it could print. Two weeks later, she was complaining about how slow it was. That s the way people are. There is a never ending desire for more and more speed and higher and higher performance like that provided by pHDD products. There was a famous author who lost the entire manuscript of her book because she had it saved on a hard drive and it crashed. She did not know that data loss was even possible. Some people have lost entire picture albums because of hard drive failures. These types of people would greatly benefit from using a pHDD product. Most normal human beings want automatic, built-in features. They don t want to have to spend time and money and effort to get RAID controller boards, extra drives or special software and then have to learn how to use all of them. Some people who need backups the most would not know how to do those things. They just want to buy a computer, take it home, plug it in and starting using it without having to worry about losing their data or without having to go do a bunch of other stuff. There is no doubt that most of them would gladly pay a significant premium to get automatic, built-in backup. 11. The Value of Data or Content In most cases, the data or content created by computer users is much more valuable than the computer hardware and software used to create it. Users may spend hundreds and hundreds of hours to create content and they would be extremely shocked, sad, sorry, unhappy, perplexed, troubled, disappointed, angry, and on and on if they suddenly lose everything because of a hard drive failure. 12. Disk Drive Companies Competing Against Their Customers One might object that if disk manufacturers developed pHDD products they would be competing against their storage subsystem customers like EMC, but that is not true because a pHDD is equivalent to a very high performance, fault-tolerant HDD. Companies like EMC would still have to assemble pHDDs into pHDD subsystems. In order to provide a variable level of automatic, built-in backup, where data is reconstructed on the fly when a component fails, all of the HDAs must be written and read simultaneously so that a pHDD really is one functional unit just like main memory protected by SEC DED is one functional unit. Since a pHDD is one functional Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 15 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com unit, it makes the most sense for disk manufacturers to develop it rather than subsystem developers such as EMC. 13. Comparing pHDDs to Previous parallel-transfer HDDs Multi-head, parallel-transfer HDDs are not new. For many years, Control Data Corporation supplied Cray Research with multi-head, parallel-transfer HDDs. Since this type of product was considered a special product, it was discontinued in Seagate s standard product line. Ibis was another company that manufactured parallel-transfer HDDs. There are, however, a number of differences between a pHDD and previous multi-head HDDs. One of the differences is that all of the HDAs in a pHDD are physically separate and independent so that if one HDA fails, it will not affect or cause another HDA to fail. Previous parallel-head HDDs transferred data to and from a parallel set of heads, but all of the heads were inside the same HDA so that a domino failure effect could occur if one head crashed sending debris out into the enclosure it could cause other heads to crash. For robust failure and fault tolerance, it is important that each head involved in a parallel data transfer be in a separate HDA, as is the case with pHDD products. Another difference between previous multi-head HDDs and pHDDs is that each controller chip in the pHDD contains a powerful, parallel Reed-Solomon (PRS) error-correcting code (ECC) encoder and decoder which enables pHDDs to be designed with an arbitrary level of automatic, built-in backup (fault-tolerance). The fault-tolerance feature does not adversely affect the performance of the pHDD, and, depending on the power of the PRS ECC, a number of HDA components can fail with no loss of data or performance. Reconstruction of potentially lost data is done on-the-fly in real time in hardware. 14. Reasons for Developing pHDD Products that use Tiny HDAs There are a number of good reasons for developing pHDD products that use tiny HDAs as components even though, initially, they will be higher priced than conventional HDDs of the same capacity. In 1987, a study was conducted by Control Data Corporation on HDD trends. At that time, 3.5 inch HDDs were just beginning to appear so the Study was based on HDDs with diameters of 14 , 8 , 5.25 and 3.5 . The Study found that as HDD physical sizes decreased, the amount of data that could be stored in a cubic volume (GigaBytes per Cubic Inch) was increasing exponentially as illustrated in Figure 1. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 16 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com GigaBytes per Cubic Inch1 2.5 3.5Disk Diameter (inches)1485.25 Figure 1 GigaBytes per Cubic Inch as a Function of Disk Diameter Another finding of the Study was that, as the HDDs were made smaller, the number of watts per unit of data (Watts per GigaByte) consumed by the drives was decreasing exponentially as shown in Figure 2. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 17 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com Watts perGigaByte1 2.5 3.5Disk Diameter (inches)1485.25 Figure 2 Watts per GigaByte as a Function of Disk Diameter The results of the Study were surprising and, to some extent, counter intuitive. Figure 3 and Figure 4 show what the curves in Figure 1 and Figure 2 would look like with speculation for drives of smaller diameters. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 18 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com GigaBytes per Cubic Inch1 2.5 3.5Disk Diameter (inches)1485.25 Figure 3 GigaBytes per Cubic Inch with Speculation about Smaller Drives Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 19 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com Watts perGigaByte1 2.5 3.5Disk Diameter (inches)1485.25 Figure 4 Watts per GigaByte with Speculation about Smaller Disks For those readers who are curious as to why the power consumed by an HDD varies so dramatically with the diameter of the disks, the reason is that the majority of the power consumed by an HDD is consumed by the motor in spinning the disks. Rotating disks are like a fan, there is a lot of aerodynamic drag, and the inertia of a disk varies as the fourth power of radius. In order to maintain the same degree of controllability, the power consumed by the motor also increases as the fourth power of radius! The results of the Study imply that the smaller the drive is, the better it is in terms of the number of GigaBytes it can store in a cubic inch and in terms of the number of watts the drive consumes per GigaByte. The disk drive industry does not immediately rush to develop smaller and smaller drives for a couple of justifiable reasons. First, when newer and smaller diameter drives are introduced into the market, they are always priced substantially higher in terms of Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 20 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com Dollars per GigaByte than older, larger diameter drives because the Dollars per GigaByte prices decrease only with manufacturing maturity and manufacturing volume which takes time as illustrated in Figure 5. 14"HDDPrice /GBytePresentTimeTime 5.25"Intro 3.5"Intro 2.5"Intro 1.8"Intro 1&.8"Intro1&.8"1.8"2.5"3.5"5.25"Price Crossover Points? Figure 5 HDD Dollars per GigaByte Prices as a Function of Time The curves in Figure 5 are generally true and accurate, but are not meant to be exact or precise. The curves in Figure 5 illustrate the fact that the introductory Dollars per GigaByte prices of all smaller diameter drives are always much higher than the existing Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 21 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com Dollars per GigaByte price of larger diameter drives, that prices will fall with time as a result of manufacturing maturity and large manufacturing volumes and that there are price crossover points. As can be seen from Figure 5, sometimes there is a price crossover point. Whenever that happens, the larger diameter drives will most likely become extinct 14 inch drives are an example. Initially, every new, smaller drive product cannot compete on a Dollar per GigaByte basis with older, mature products that are being manufactured in high volumes. Therefore, there is naturally a strong reluctance in any existing large disk drive company to start to develop smaller form factor drives because they will not be attractive to customers initially, and they will not initially generate the profit that older drives are generating. When going to smaller drives, the capacity per drive decreases substantially and, to implement large capacity disk databases, more smaller drives (or components) are needed than if larger capacity drives were used. This increase in the number of components in disk databases decreases the mean time between failures (MTBF) of the database system because the MTBF of a system is inversely proportional to the number of components in the system. There is an answer to the MTBF problem. The answer is to implement an error-correction system that can automatically correct for component failures, and that is precisely what ECC Tek s PRS ECC does. It is sometimes difficult to overcome the initial unattractiveness of smaller form factor drives due to their higher Dollar per GigaByte cost and price. However, in the case of HDAs to be used as components in pHDD products, it is important to anticipate manufacturing volumes and to anticipate when there will be another price crossover point. Assume that, on the average, each pHDD contains 16 HDA components. According to a recent CNET news article, 254 million conventional HDDs were sold in 2003, 278 million are forecast to be sold in 2004 and 358 million will be sold in 2007. Since a pHDD is roughly equivalent to an equal capacity conventional HDD, manufacturing volumes of HDAs would be 16x the volumes of conventional HDDs so that, if 10% of the conventional HDDs were replaced with pHDDs, that would result in approximately 30 million pHDDs being sold in 2005 and 36 million pHDDs sold in 2007. Those numbers translate into 480 million HDAs being sold in 2005 and 576 million HDAs being sold in 2007. It s easy to see that HDA manufacturing volumes could quickly exceed more than 1 billion units per year which would put the HDA component into the same category as a DRAM memory chip as far as manufacturing is concerned since billions of DRAM chips are sold each year. Without a doubt, manufacturing more than a billion HDAs per year would cause an unprecedented drop in HDA costs and prices. Never before in the history of the disk drive industry has the manufacturing volume of a single device even come close to approaching the billion units per year level. Large manufacturing volumes could signal the emergence of a new price crossover point. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 22 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com It is expected that the trends identified in the 1987 Control Data HDD Study have continued and that pHDDs developed today using tiny disk HDAs as components will, most likely, be physically smaller, consume less power and have higher performance than conventional HDDs of the same capacity. Current tiny drives are being threatened by Flash memory. If Flash is successful, there may be an excess number of tiny drives and the market for tiny HDDs may dry up. Any excess tiny drive HDAs could be used in pHDD products. Since the beginning of the disk drive industry in 1957, dominant disk drive diameters have stayed at one level for a number of years and then decreased. The most dominant disk drive diameter has gone from 24 in 1957 to 14 to 8 to 5.25 and now to 3.5 . Never has the most dominant diameter increased. There is no reason to believe that this trend will stop. 15. Performance Reasons for Developing pHDD Products Today's hard disk drives are the only components in a modern computer that operate on data one bit at a time! Think of it! Processors in modern PCs can operate on 32-bit or 64-bit chunks of data at a rate of up to 3 GigaHertz, yet conventional HDDs read and write data one bit at a time! In order for the data transfer rate of an HDD to match the data transfer rates of other parallel-transfer components such as microprocessor chips or main memories, a parallel-transfer HDD or a pHDD must be developed. Any conventional HDD of capacity C can be divided into K, HDA components of capacity C/K which will result in the creation of a pHDD with the same capacity but with K times the transfer rate. The RPM of the component HDAs can be the same or higher than the RPM of a conventional HDD and the HDA disks can be synchronized to each other to create pHDDs that will always outperform conventional HDDs of the same capacity. The pHDD will be able to read and write data K times faster than an equivalent capacity, conventional HDD and the seek times and rotational latencies should be equivalent or better than those of a conventional HDD. pHDDs can be made fault-tolerant with an arbitrary level of built-in fault-tolerance by using a parallel, Reed-Solomon error-correcting encoder and decoder such as the ones designed, developed and patented by ECC Tek. The performance and level of fault tolerance in all RAID storage systems could be dramatically improved by unplugging the existing, conventional HDDs and plugging in pHDDs. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 23 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com 16. Performance Reasons to Develop pHDD Arrays The performance of an HDD array compared to the performance of a pHDD array is shown in Figure 6. PHIOPHIOPHPHIOPHIOPHPHIOPHIOPHPHIOPHIOPHpHDD 1pHDD 2pHDD 3pHDD NpHDD Array PerformanceHDD Array PerformancePH = Position HeadsIO = Input or Output Data TransferPHIOPHPHIOPHIOPHPHPHIOPHIOPHIOPHIOIOHDD 1HDD 2HDD 3HDD NPHPHIOPHIOPHIOPHIOPHPHIOPHIOPHIOPHIO Figure 6 Performance of HDD Arrays Compared to Performance of pHDD Arrays Given any HDD array with N HDDs, the performance of the HDD array is illustrated in the upper part of Figure 6. The lines labeled with PH represent the average time it takes to position the heads and the lines labeled with IO represent the average time it takes to do an input or output data transfer to one of the drives. Given any HDD of capacity C, a pHDD of the same capacity that uses K HDAs can always be developed, and the transfer rate of the equivalent capacity pHDD will be K times the transfer rate of the HDD while the average time to position the heads will Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 24 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com remain the same. Given the performance of any HDD array with N HDDs as shown in the upper part of Figure 6, a pHDD array can be developed with N equal capacity pHDDs that will clearly outperform the HDD array by a wide margin as illustrated in the lower part of Figure 6. 17. Failure and Fault Tolerance Reasons for Developing pHDD Products With the use of a parallel Reed-Solomon encoder and decoder within each pHDD and with R redundant drives in each pHDD, up to R drives can fail with no loss of data and performance. In addition, the raw error rates of each component HDA can be much higher than conventional HDD raw error rates because the PRS system can correct any random errors that the conventional RS decoder does not correct. In most cases, a pHDD with one PRS encoder and decoder will be used with N conventional RS encoders and decoders. The conventional RS decoders will correct most of the errors due to defects and random errors in each HDA. The PRS decoder will correct errors that the conventional RS decoders cannot possibly correct like errors caused by HDA failures, head crashes, etc. 18. Reasons for Developing pHDD Products Related to Manufacturing Manufacturing pHDDs instead of HDDs could dramatically reduce the number of types of HDAs that a disk drive manufacturer would have to manufacture. Today, the major disk drive vendors manufacture 40-60 different HDD models. There are some common components in current manufacturers HDDs, such as common heads and common disks, but it is important to understand that each HDA has its own very precise mechanical characteristics and that those characteristics, such as the resonance frequencies, can change with only slight differences in structure. Because of that, two different HDAs even though they use the same heads and same disks may have completely different vibration characteristics and may require two different servo systems. With a pHDD, all of the HDAs would be identical and all of the servo systems would be identical. If the major disk drive vendors only manufactured pHDDs, they would only have to manufacture a few types of HDAs (possibly only one type) yet they could still create literally hundreds of different pHDD models by using a different number of data and/or redundant drives in each model. Each pHDD model would then have its own level of performance and fault tolerance. The manufacturing volume of HDAs would be dramatically increased from millions per year to hundreds of millions per year. The HDA components would be assembled into pHDDs in the same way as any other component would be. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 25 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com A large disk drive company could potentially save millions of dollars quarterly if it gradually switched from designing and manufacturing HDDs to designing and manufacturing pHDDs. 19. Reasons for Developing pHDD Products Based on More Effective Use of Media and More Profit Potential ECC Tek is proposing that pHDD products be developed that could use media that has been rejected as unusable in conventional HDDs because of too many errors and/or defects. Selling pHDDs which use highly defective media at normal HDD price levels instead of deeply discounted prices could enable all disk drive companies to make more effective use of manufactured media and to realize millions of dollars in revenue that otherwise would not exist. pHDD products which use media that is unusable in conventional HDDs will, most likely, be much more reliable than standard HDDs because a lateral , horizontal or parallel ECC coding scheme will be used in combination with the conventional, longitudinal , vertical or serial ECC scheme that is used in conventional HDDs. The horizontal ECC literally opens up an entirely new dimension to the problem of correcting errors because now ECC can be applied to a two-dimensional array of data items instead of just a one-dimensional array of data items as is currently being done in conventional HDDs. No one will be able to legitimately claim that pHDD products which use media unusable in conventional HDDs are in any way inferior to standard HDDs. In fact, those types of pHDD products will, most likely, be highly superior in performance and reliability to conventional HDDs. With a number of HDAs ganged together, the new parallel RS decoder and the improved serial RS decoders will have information from multiple, statistically independent sources and the resulting random distribution of errors will be ideally suited for correction using RS codes. The law of large numbers (from statistics) applies to pHDDs, and the result is that the statistical or probabilistic behavior of the system will closely follow probabilistic models so the behavior of pHDD systems will be very predictable. 20. Reasons for Developing pHDD Products Related to Users Experience Users of desktop and laptop computer systems will be willing to pay a premium for a PC or Mac if it has an ultra-fast, failure-tolerant hard drive in it. If a system already costs over a thousand dollars, many users will be willing to pay an additional premium to get a super-duper, ultra-high-performance, fail-safe hard drive in the same way that users are willing to pay a premium to get Intel's fastest and most powerful processors. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 26 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com Once users use a Pentium PC operating at 3 GHz, they will never be willing to go back to a Pentium PC operating at 250 MHz! There is a market for faster processors because users like them, get used to using them and don't want anything slower once they use them. The same thing will be true for systems which contain pHDDs in place of conventional HDDs. Users will buy them because they will only cost a little more than systems that contain conventional HDDs, but they will be much faster and will have automatic, built-in backup. In a PC, pHDDs will accelerate boot up, accelerate all OS disk operations and accelerate application programs. Once users get used to using systems which contain pHDDs, they will never go back to systems that use conventional HDDs. One major impact to users of PCs which contain a pHDD instead of a conventional HDD would be that, on power up, the operating system would load into memory almost instantaneously like an "instant on" computer. Most PC users would love that. Another impact on computer users would be the increased level of comfort and security a user would feel knowing that, if one or more HDA components fail, no data will be lost. All the user has to do is remove the failing drive component and replace it with a new one just like replacing a light bulb. Any application programs that do a lot of disk I/O would also see a significant performance boost such as programs that download music, movies or pictures. 21. Migration of Technology from Supercomputers to PCs Approximately 30 years ago, supercomputers had clock rates of around 1 GHz. Today, many PCs have more computing power than supercomputers did 30 years ago. Technologies and techniques that were used in past supercomputers are currently being used in PCs. Since parallel-transfer HDDs were used in past supercomputers, it is likely they will soon be used in PCs also. 22. If Not Now, When? Numerous people have said the pHDD is an idea whose time has not yet come. Assume that statement is true. If now is not the right time, when is the right time? Wouldn t it be better for a disk drive company to develop a pHDD product a little before it s time than a little after it s time? Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 27 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com 23. If Not Seagate, Who? Seagate is the largest manufacturer of disk drives in the world and is currently in the process of purchasing Maxtor. After the purchase of Maxtor, Seagate s next largest competitor will only be about half the size of Seagate. If Seagate is not the right company to implement a pHDD product, then what company is? Western Digital does not have a tiny drive, Hitachi GST does not seem to be doing very well and is losing money, Cornice is a startup struggling to survive and Toshiba, Fujitsu and Samsung are unknowns. Seagate appears to be the best company to develop a pHDD product since it is highly profitable and growing. 24. How Will Anyone Know if a pHDD is a Viable Product if No Company Will Ever Develop One? One of the most difficult things to understand is that, since there are many indications that the pHDD idea makes sense, could be highly successful and could potentially be a revolutionary product, why is it that no company will even consider developing one? It would not be tremendously difficult to develop. Most likely, the questions that are most difficult to answer regarding pHDDs will never be answered until some company decides to implement it. Why would a highly profitable disk drive company continually refuse to try it? 25. A pHDD is not the Same as a Conventional RAID System Conventional RAID systems require much more circuit redundancy than a pHDD requires. All of the digital electronics in a pHDD can be integrated on one large System on Chip ASIC. Many separate chips are required in a conventional RAID implementation. pHDDs can have a variable level of built-in backup or fault-tolerance, and conventional RAID system cannot. Nearly all RAID systems tolerate only one drive failure. Some conventional RAID systems tolerate two failed drives, but there is a severe performance degradation in those systems. No conventional RAID systems can tolerate an arbitrary number of HDA failures as a pHDD can. Reconstruction of lost data in conventional RAID systems takes a very long time and, during that period, the system is susceptible to catastrophic failure. This problem is becoming more severe as capacities of conventional HDDs increase. pHDDs can be designed with an arbitrary level of built-in fault tolerance and reconstruction of the lost data can be done in a tiny fraction of the time that it takes in conventional RAID systems without any risk of a catastrophic failure. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 28 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com 26. Legal Issues Regarding ECC Tek Licensing IP It is important to keep a few things in mind regarding any legal issues having to do with ECC Tek, the parallel RS patent or the pHDD technology. ECC Tek will do everything within its power to avoid any involvement with lawyers or lawsuits. Getting involved with lawyers and lawsuits is the very last thing ECC Tek wants. ECC Tek personnel have read several books on patents and intellectual property issues, have written the PRS Patent (except the claims), and have written all of ECC Tek's Agreements with little help from lawyers. ECC Tek has negotiated all of its Agreements with no help from lawyers. ECC Tek has no intention of suing any other party and wants to avoid litigation at all costs because ECC Tek has seen first hand what extended litigation is like in the case of Rodime s 7-year litigation with Seagate. They were involved with litigation for a long time with an uncertain outcome. ECC Tek does not want that and will do everything it can to avoid that type of a situation. ECC Tek wants to know the outcome of things it is involved with. The wisest thing for any disk drive company to do in situations where advanced technology and IP is involved is to immediately acquire any IP that they think they may have an interest in because then they would own the IP and could completely avoid any possible future litigation regarding that IP. It is the wisest thing to do because the outcome is known. Nobody can ever know the outcome of litigation and how long the litigation will take. For example, in the case of Rodime, Seagate spent 7 years in litigation and ended up paying a 45 million settlement. In hindsight, it clearly would have been a much better strategy for Seagate to acquire or license Rodime's patents upfront even if they were overpriced rather than spend 7 years in litigation with an unknown outcome. Nobody can know the outcome of that type of litigation because judges and juries cannot understand the technology and they might as well flip a coin to make their decision as listen to arguments. No judges or juries would understand the parallel Reed-Solomon technology and patent. A disk drive company could avoid any possible litigation and avoid any possible legal fees regarding the parallel RS patent and regarding ECC Tek, by offering to either license the PRS patent or acquire ECC Tek. There are all kinds of different acquisition scenarios that would guarantee a disk drive company a desirable outcome with no uncertainty at a reasonable cost. ECC Tek is open to any kind of reasonable offer from any disk drive company to acquire the PRS patent or acquire ECC Tek. ECC Tek believes now is the right time for the pHDD technology to get implemented and will do whatever it takes to make that happen. Probably all of the money spent by Seagate and Rodime in their IP litigation went to the lawyers all of it! Think of it. If we could negotiate a deal with no lawyers involved on either side until the last minute, we could prevent all of that money going to lawyers. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 29 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com 27. IP Landmines It is appropriate to use military analogies to get an understanding of certain business situations in highly competitive industries. If there is a war and the military wants to move into an area that has previously been occupied by the enemy, they must first do their best to detonate or disarm all of the landmines. It takes time, money, and effort and possibly the loss of equipment and lives to do it, but there is no other choice. If they don't do it, they risk a much larger loss of time, money, equipment and life later on. The landmine analogy applies to high tech businesses today. IP owned by competitors are the landmines. If potential competitors have been in a technology area before you decide to go into that area, you may come across some IP landmines. The only reasonable thing to do in that situation is to sweep the area of IP landmines before you enter that area. IP landmines are detonated or disarmed by acquiring the IP so you own it. If you own it, it can't hurt you later on. You might suffer some small losses in the process, but it is much better than risking much larger losses later on. ECC Tek has been in the pHDD and RAID area since 1982. ECC Tek conceived of the pHDD idea 5 years before the influential 1987 RAID paper entitled "The Case for Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks" was written at the U of CA in Berkeley by Randy Katz, David Patterson and some graduate students. ECC Tek knows the history and details of RAID and all of the RAID issues. ECC Tek has no intention of suing any other party and will do everything within its power to avoid lawyers and any type of litigation. However, that might not be the case if one of your competitors owns ECC Tek's IP. 28. PRS ECC IP Available from ECC Tek Only It is important for every disk drive company to keep in mind that the parallel Reed-Solomon (PRS) designs needed to create an arbitrary level of automatic, built-in backup in pHDD products are only available from ECC Tek. PRS designs cannot be acquired from any other source in the world other than ECC Tek, and if they are independently developed, they will be infringing ECC Tek s PRS patent. That's why NASA, Raytheon and others have licensed the PRS designs from ECC Tek even though ECC Tek is a tiny company. ECC Tek s PRS patent is valid until 2015. The PRS designs have been implemented by NASA and others and have been operating every day for several years with no problems. Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 30 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com 29. ECC Tek has Set the Standard in Space I think it is fair to say that ECC Tek has set the standard for the use of ECC Tek's PRS ECC in space. ECC Tek is well positioned to set the standard for PRS in pHDDs also, but we need a disk drive company to partner with us to make it happen! 30. Endorsements 30.1. Endorsements for ECC Technologies, Inc. ("ECC Tek") QSS Group, Inc. (QSS a major subcontractor to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) and NASA GSFC licensed parallel Reed-Solomon (PRS) encoder and decoder designs, written in synthesizable Verilog, from ECC Technologies, Inc. (ECC Tek) for possible use in NASA's next-generation space telescope project recently renamed to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). ECC Tek delivered the PRS designs to QSS and NASA GSFC in a timely fashion and the performance of the PRS designs met JWST project requirements. QSS and NASA GSFC would recommend to any company with a need for PRS ECC to consider licensing PRS designs from ECC Tek." Alex Kisin Sr. Staff Electrical Engineer QSS/NASA GSFC Code 561(301) 286-0424 http://www.qssgroupinc.com/ "Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems has licensed parallel Reed-Solomon (PRS) encoder and decoder designs written in synthesizable Verilog from ECC Technologies (ECC Tek) for use in a space based product. The PRS designs licensed from ECC Tek are working and ECC Tek has provided Raytheon SAS with the necessary support to ensure our success." Mark Gordon Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems P.O. Box 902 2200 East Imperial Highway Bldg. RE, M/S R07/P540 El Segundo, CA 90245 (310) 334-7838 "Provigent licensed Reed-Solomon encoder and decoder designs from ECC Technologies, Inc. (ECC Tek), for use in Provigent's broadband [IEEE 802.16] wireless transceiver chip. The modules were designed for ultra-high speed applications, requiring high programmability, and minimal decoder latency. ECC Tek delivered the designs to Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 31 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com Provigent on schedule, meeting all of these requirements, and achieving modules optimized for the above constraints. The modules were written in synthesizable Verilog, maintaining Provigent's methodologies, and were easily integrated into the chip. Provigent would highly recommend to any company with a need for ECC IP to consider licensing IP from ECC Tek. ECC Tek proved a reliable source of licensed software, highly capable and responsive." Michal Katzir VLSI Manager Provigent Ltd.4 Adva St. Herzelia 46764, Israel Phone:+972 9 950-5434 (ext. 210) Fax: +972 9 950-5683 http://www.provigent.com/ "NxtWave Communications has licensed a Reed-Solomon decoder core from ECC Technologies, Inc. ECC performed the modeling, design and implementation of the core with a high degree of professionalism. The deliverables in the form of system model, synthesizable Verilog source code, test benches and design documentation exceeded our expectations. The project was executed on schedule and within budget. We highly recommend ECC as a source for this technology." Bernardo Paratore VP I.C.Product Development Applications Engineering NxtWave Communications One Summit Square Langhorne, PA 19047 (215) 688-9475 (Mobile) (267) 757-1109 (267) 757-1120 (FAX) "Telegrid Technologies, Inc. licensed Reed-Solomon decoder software from ECC Technologies, Inc. On this task, ECC performed the design and implementation of the software with a high degree of professionalism. The final product met our specifications and exceeded our performance requirements. Before starting, ECC made sure they understood our application and as a result, required very little support from our technical personnel. The final product was delivered on schedule and within budget. We highly recommend ECC as a capable and responsive source of licensed software." Igal Sharret President Telegrid Technologies, Inc. Eatontown, NJ http://www.telegrid.com/ Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 32 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com 30.2. Endorsements for Phil White "Phil was always a conscientious and capable worker, and was well-liked and respected by his management and co-workers. He made a number of contributions to the development of error-control methods, primarily for mass storage (disc, tape) products, and understands this technology well. I would have no qualms in recommending him for engineering and research work in this field." Dr. Donald B. Bonstrom (retired) Former VP & Director of Central Research Labs Control Data Corporation "Mr. White is among the most loyal and conscientious employees that I have had the opportunity to supervise at Control Data. I can recommend Mr. White without reservation on both a personal and a professional basis, and I would not hesitate to enlist his help in the future, if the occasion should arise." Dr. Robert W. Johnson (retired) Former General Manager of Research Division Control Data Corporation "I have known Phil White for more than [thirty] years. During that time I have never known or been told of any event which would contradict my firmly held opinion of him. He is an unusually sincere and forthright individual without any symptoms of guile or deceit. I would trust him far beyond the limits that would be set for an average individual. His introspective nature and basic honesty are refreshing characteristics in the modern world." Dr. Meredith (Matt) S. Ulstad (retired) Former CDC Research Scientist and Part-time Professor "Phil specializes in logic design, especially on the design of error-correction codes and appropriate hardware. He understands this subject and is a great specialist in this area." Dr. Vadim Minuhin (retired) Sr. Consulting Research Scientist Seagate Technology 30.3. Endorsement for the pHDD Concept "You did an excellent job in laying out the reasons why arrays of tiny disk drives would be a successful strategy. I think you are right on when you say that people would pay for a high-performance fault-tolerant disk drive [or pHDD]. &If one could buy a computer with a fail-safe hard drive that was also higher performance, I think it would be a big seller..." Jay Seaver Former VP of Advanced Technology Untitled DocumentReasons Why pHDDs Should Be Developed Into Commercial Products Page 33 of 33 ECC Technologies, Inc. Phil White 952-935-2885 phil.white@ecctek.com Maxtor Corporation
