James,
The difficulty in getting information on toroidal heads is this: the patent office is mandated to keep ALL patent applications confidential for obvious competitive reasons. Also, the patent applicant is seriously limited in how it can market the patent application. If I recall correctly it has to clearly state that a patent is pending or a patent is being applied for. So, other than what is disclosed in the trades and what Ampex discloses in the SEC filings I don't expect we will get any info on toroidal heads. And why should Ampex and Velocidata lay down their cards this early, right? I suspect that the people with iron-clad non-disclosure agreements probably have access to all the technical details. Too early to even guess at the 'time to market' of this puppy. At this point, let's assume that FC=toroidal until more info comes along to change that.
As we can handicap now, since ReadRite heads were used in the tests described in the September issue of Data Storage, it is probably the head manufacturer that AXC has been working with. ReadRite has advanced inductive heads (with undershoot reduction), advanced inductive planar heads, and MR heads. As for the drive manufacturer, I previously thought it was IBM mainly because Roger Wood, one of the co-inventors of the 1991 patent, was last sighted at IBM. As it turns out, based on the papers he is presenting at InterMag 97, he is on official leave from IBM and is currently working on some projects with the Data Storage Institute, a Singaporean government outfit. So that's that. Back to square one on that one.
Some of you may want to research further this HMTT connection. A good starting place is HMTT patent #5,576,085 at...
patent.womplex.ibm.com
...that references the KM patent, discusses it in some detail and attempts to improve it without the use of a bias current. The HM in HMTT refers to its previous status as a unit of Hitachi Metals. HMTT is also acknowledged as the technology leader among the merchant platter suppliers. For example, Komag (16% market share) is currently having yield problems with its 2000 oe platters while HMTT (6% market share) made that shift last year and is currently working on 2200 oe and above platters. Anyway, this is the breakdown of their customer base last quarter:
MAXTOR - 50%
Samsung - 20%
Micropolis - 14%
others - 16%
Total 100% or 5.4 million units.
In the conference call, HMTT disclosed that they were qualifying for the new drive programs of WDC and Quantum. Just recently they also completed a private placement that they expect to use to double their capacity, from the previous 15 sputtering lines to around 31 lines by adding 2 sputtering lines per quarter. I believe they are getting the latest state of the art static sputtering machines from Intevac (IVAC) which is the acknowledged leader in that category which, in turn, is probably why it has an inordinately large backlog of orders.
Gus
P.S. Re: DS. Run an excite search for "data storage" AND PennWell. |
