Cornice spins miniature drive for consumer play

Cornice spins miniature drive for consumer play
Paris - Cornice Inc.'s unusual 1-inch hard drive will be integrated into the portable consumer electronics devices of a dozen companies, including Samsung and RCA. Five of them expect to have those products, which include MP3 players, digital cameras and PDAs, in retail stores by the end of the year.

The Cornice Storage Element is not a traditional removable hard-disk drive. Instead, it is designed for placement directly on a motherboard, which makes for lower-priced units and simpler requirements than conventional drives, according to Kevin Magenis, president and chief executive officer of Cornice (Longmont, Colo.).

The Cornice drive, which has been in mass production since April, even costs less than solid-state flash memory, Magenis said. "Consumers can't afford to buy flash," he said. "When the Samsungs of the world start embracing our drive, their competitors will take notice. Some OEMs are considering a hybrid approach-using a disk drive for a motherboard and a flash for a removable storage."

Cornice has designed a low-cost, high-capacity storage device aimed solely at portable consumer platforms. The 1-inch, 1.5-Gbyte Cornice drive is priced at $60 per unit for OEMs. In contrast, the average OEM unit cost for a 1-Gbyte flash memory is about $180, according to Cornice.

Cornice's stripped-down disk drive goes without such features as caching, male and female connectors and redundant RAM and ROM, which are necessary for conventional PC hard drives. The Cornice drive architecture reduces the unit's mechanical parts to one-third of those required for conventional microdrives, cuts the electronic component count to 25, and the IC count to three, according to Magenis. That effectively translates into "a faster time for assembly and half the cost" compared with the competing 1-inch Hitachi Microdrive, he added. Developed by IBM in 1999, the Microdrive is now sold by Hitachi Ltd., which acquired IBM's storage products operations in 2002.

The idea of developing a miniature drive for consumer devices is not new. Magenis estimated that "more than $500 million has been spent over the last 18 years by various players in the disk drive industry." Those companies, which include DataPlay, IBM, Integral and Marqlin, had the common goal of creating tiny drives to capture the virtually untapped portable consumer electronics storage market. However, until now, no HDD products have hit the price point required by consumer devices, said Magenis.

The three ICs used in Cornice's embedded drive include a preamplifier, a spin servo device and what the company calls a "transition IC" that enables communication between Cornice's drive and a host processor in a portable consumer device.

Unlike an Intel-dominated standardized PC platform, consumer electronics devices are notorious for the wide variety of microprocessors and motherboard ar-chitectures they use. To make it easier for OEMs to integrate its drive into their motherboards, the startup's engineering team chose not to develop different IC versions that could connect the company's drive with different types of host processors. Instead, the team designed a transition IC based on a compact flash interface, according to Curt Bruner, Cornice's CTO.

Cornice's embedded-storage element is designed to execute out of RAM on the motherboard, rather than on the drive itself. It doesn't have to spin the drive all the time, minimizing battery drain in portable devices, the company said. Further, the motherboard integration helped Cornice achieve high shock resistance for its drive without adding a lot of mechanical elements to suspend the drive unit.

Aside from the unique design of its Storage Element, the Cornice CEO believes that his company, which was founded in 2000 by three hard-disk drive industry veterans, is in position to handle the high-volume production of storage devices at a very low cost.