News and New Products

PRML read-channel IC combines speed, low power

-- EDN, 6/6/1996

Start-up Marvell Semiconductor has announced the MVL88P and MVL88E families of read-channel ICs with PR4 and extended-PR4 encoding, respectively. The devices implement partial-response maximum-likelihood (PRML) data recovery using primarily digital circuitry and achieve densities as great as 2.8 bits. The devices support 200-Mbps speeds and consume less than 800 mW from a 5V supply and consume even less when you invoke power-management modes. The devices include timebase generators, AGC, analog lowpass filters, A/D converters, digital filters, timing-recovery circuits, Viterbi decoder, data en-coders/decoders, data serializers and deserializers, and write-precompensation and servo data-detection circuitry.

Beyond basic data recovery, the ICs also support auxiliary functions. You can use them to build self-calibrating drives by detecting and compensating for disk-to-disk magnetic variations and can tolerate a range of head and media variations. In addition, the read-channel devices can gather performance-related statistics for the drive assembly and, thus, give early indication of possible drive problems and even impending failure. Both versions come in 80-lead TQFPs and cost less than $10 (OEM).

—by Bill Schweber

Marvell Semiconductor Inc, Cu-pertino, CA. (408) 777-0841.