Mobile Magazine » hitachi

Japan’s e-ink Paper-like Display Does HD Video in Color

Ollie Green — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 02:21:39 +0000

Japan Display Inc., a merger of Toshiba’s, Sony’s and Hitachi’s small LCD businesses have worked with the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan to create a low-power color display that works similarly to an E-ink kindle device.

Rather than using a backlit display like most traditional LCDs, the new reflective LCD display panels by Japan Display Inc. use an external light source to show clear images to the viewer, but what makes it special is its ability to play full HD color video.

Three components make up the display; a rear reflective layer and a front light control layer which hold together the liquid crystal layer. All three parts are used together to help display the images on the LCD panel. When light is reflected from the rear electrode, it passes through the crystal layer, which will create a single-shaded image, which will then be filtered by the light control layer to show color.

So how is this like paper? The technology itself can be extremely easy to view in highly lighted conditions like outside on a sunny day, or in a lit house similarly to older Kindle models, but unlike Kindle, the LCD display shows crisp paper-like colors.

There are currently two different models in development by Japan Display Inc., of which one is nearing completion, and it won’t be long before the technology is ready for mass production.

Both models have slightly different reflection rates and different pixel ratios, with the near-completed model boasting 768×1044 pixels, and the second model displaying 576×1024 pixels on the screen.

What makes the new tech even more unique is it’s impressive battery-saving qualities when displaying still images; power consumption is kept to around 3 mW when showing static images because of the displays ability to retain data once it has been written.

I don’t know what you think of Japan Display Incs.’ work, but to me this technology is almost like a super-advanced Etch-A-Sketch.

Do you think the reflective displays could become a standard for LCD manufacturers in the near future?

[Source]

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Never Loss Your Data Again; Hitachi Preparing Permanent Quart Glass Storage Technology

Andrew Grush — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:32:14 +0000

You have a bunch of important photos and files stored on a CD or flash drive. You go to retreive them, many print some stuff off, and the worst occurs: the data isn’t readable. This nightmare happens more often than we’d wish. I’m sure just about everyone has gone through the loss of precious data in our computer (or post-computer) world. What if your data could truly be permanently saved?

A new technology by Hitachi plans to use quartz glass as a data storage medium, with a goal of marketing the technology to businesses as early as 2015. How does it work? Basically the technology uses a laser that etches into three layers on the crystals at a density a bit higher than a CD. The data can then be read/retrieved via an optical microscope. The bottom line with this method is that the data is safe, which is very important for multi-billion dollar organizations with secret data files to protect. Putting its claim of permanent safe storage to the test, Hitachi even put the glass through two hours of 3500-degree Fahrenheit torture. As they hoped, there was no data loss even under these conditions.

At first, companies will have to send their data in to Hitachi and other vendors with the technology to have it stored into the glass. In time, glass etching storage burners might be as commonplace as a DVD burner is today.

[ source ]

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Western Digital Buys Hitachi’s Hard Drive Wing for $4.3 Billion

Michael Kwan — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 01:07:30 +0000

You know how everybody owns everybody and even though you see different brands, they really are the same company? That kind of idea infiltrates just about every industry and the hard drive business is no exception. The latest deal sees Hitachi Global Storage Technologies snatched up by Western Digital for a cool $4.3 billion.

The deal is worth $3.5 billion in cash and $750 million in WD common stock. The brand and headquarters for Western Digital will emerge out the other end, but Hitachi GST’s president and CEO will take over as the president of Western Digital.

Will this help or hurt innovation? Will this help or hurt competition? Well, we already saw a similar deal six years ago when Seagate picked up Maxtor for $2 billion. With today’s announcement, the WD vs. Seagate battle just stepped up another notch, as if it wasn’t already clear enough that these are the two biggest juggernauts in the HDD game.

Western Digital to Acquire Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

Combination of Hard Drive Companies Will Create Industry’s Broadest Product Portfolio and a Significant Pool of Resources for Innovation

IRVINE, Calif. and SAN JOSE, Calif., March 7, 2011 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Western Digital (NYSE: WDC) and Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT / TSE:6501) announced today that they have entered into a definitive agreement whereby WD will acquire Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., in a cash and stock transaction valued at approximately $4.3 billion. The proposed combination will result in a customer-focused storage company, with significant operating scale, strong global talent and the industry’s broadest product lineup backed by a rich technology portfolio.

Under the terms of the agreement, WD will acquire Hitachi GST for $3.5 billion in cash and 25 million WD common shares valued at $750 million, based on a WD closing stock price of $30.01 as of March 4, 2011. Hitachi, Ltd. will own approximately ten percent of Western Digital shares outstanding after issuance of the shares and two representatives of Hitachi will be added to the WD board of directors at closing. The transaction has been approved by the board of directors of each company and is expected to close during the third calendar quarter of 2011, subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals. WD plans to fund the transaction with a combination of existing cash and total debt of approximately $2.5 billion.

WD expects the transaction to be immediately accretive to its earnings per share on a non-GAAP basis, excluding acquisition-related expenses, restructuring charges and amortization of intangibles.

The resulting company will retain the Western Digital name and remain headquartered in Irvine, California. John Coyne will remain chief executive officer of WD, Tim Leyden chief operating officer and Wolfgang Nickl chief financial officer. Steve Milligan, president and chief executive officer of Hitachi GST, will join WD at closing as president, reporting to John Coyne.

“The acquisition of Hitachi GST is a unique opportunity for WD to create further value for our customers, stockholders, employees, suppliers and the communities in which we operate,” said John Coyne, president and chief executive officer of WD. “We believe this step will result in several key benefits-enhanced R&D capabilities, innovation and expansion of a rich product portfolio, comprehensive market coverage and scale that will enhance our cost structure and ability to compete in a dynamic marketplace. The skills and contributions of both workforces were key considerations in assessing this compelling opportunity. We will be relying on the proven integration capabilities of both companies to assure the ongoing satisfaction of our customers and to bring this combination to successful fruition.”

“This brings together two industry leaders with consistent track records of strong execution and industry outperformance,” said Steve Milligan, president and chief executive officer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “Together we can provide customers worldwide with the industry’s most compelling and diverse set of products and services, from innovative personal storage to solid state drives for the enterprise.”

Hiroaki Nakanishi, president, Hitachi, Ltd. said, “As the former CEO of Hitachi GST, I always believed in the potential of Hitachi GST to become a larger and more agile company. This is a strategic combination of two industry leaders, both growing and profitable. It provides an opportunity for the new company to increase customer and shareholder value and expand into new markets. Additionally, it is important to us that WD shares common values with Hitachi GST to create a more global company that is well positioned to define a broader role in the evolving storage industry.”

WD’s exclusive financial adviser on the transaction is Bank of America Merrill Lynch; its lead legal adviser is O’Melveny & Myers LLP. Goldman, Sachs & Co serves as financial adviser to Hitachi, Ltd. and Hitachi GST. Legal advisers to Hitachi, Ltd. and Hitachi GST are Morrison Foerster LLP and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP & Affiliates, respectively.

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Hitachi Travelstar superslim 500GB mobile hard drive is just 7mm

Andrew Anderson — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 19:34:07 +0000

Hitachi has upped the ante for hard-drive manufacturers going into 2011 with their new line of Travelstar hard-drives, cramming 500GB into a 7mm package.

Shaving 2mm of the z-height of a hard-drive may not sound like very much, but with most standard consumer drives weighing in at 9.5mm, the Travelstar is officially the highest-capacity drive ever produced in the form-factor. Hitachi’s claims give the Travelstar line the highest gigabyte-per-cubic-millimetre ratio when compared to SSD, 9.5mm, 2.5in or 1.8in HDD. This more-efficient storage is paramount as laptop manufacturers continue to push for smaller and thinner hardware in their own right.

Travelstars will spin at 5,400rpm, have available capacities of 250GB, 320GB and 500GB and leverage the increasingly-used larger 4k sector size. Expect these drives to connect with SATA 3Gbps and ship with 8MB cache.

For their own products, Hitachi plans to remodel their line of G-Drive Slim USB external hard-drives with the new Travelstars for Q1 2011. In the meantime, you should start seeing standalone Travelstar Z5K500 drives before the end of the year.

HITACHI GST SHIPS INDUSTRY’S FIRST, ONE-DISK 7MM 500GB HARD DRIVE

Hitting the Industry Sweet Spot in the 2.5-inch Hard Drive Market, New Thin and Rugged Travelstar™ Z5K500 Drive Enables Innovative Designs for Ultra-portable CE Devices, Laptops and Netbooks, and Compact Industrial Systems;
G-Technology™ G-DRIVE Slim™ Ships with the New Travelstar Z5K500 drive, Making it the Thinnest 500GB, 2.5-inch External Hard Drive in the World
SAN JOSE, Calif., December 16, 2010–Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced its new 500GB, 5,400 RPM Travelstar Z5K500 drive – the industry’s highest capacity, one-disk, 7 millimeter (mm) z-height hard disk drive (HDD).

According to IDC¹, 500GB, mobile 2.5-inch drives represent 22 percent of the market today, with this capacity growing 42 percent annually from 2010 to 2013. Offered in a complete family of 500GB, 320GB and 250GB, which satisfies more than 77 percent of today’s capacity needs in the portable PC market¹, these drives are the industry’s only second-generation family of 5,400 RPM, 7mm z-height drives, which are designed as a direct replacement for standard 2.5-inch, 9.5mm drives in everything from external drives to laptops, netbooks and blade servers. All this combined puts the new Hitachi Travelstar Z5K500 drive family in the industry sweet spot of opportunity in the mobile 2.5-inch market.

With its slim profile and high capacities, the Hitachi Travelstar Z5K500 drive family delivers the best cost per gigabyte and gigabyte per cubic millimeter (GB/mm3) when compared to solid state drives (SSD), and 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch 9.5mm HDDs, offering a compelling value proposition for OEMs and system integrators. With the broadest line of 7,200 and 5,400 RPM 7mm drives now at their fingertips, Hitachi customers can differentiate product lines by utilizing space savings to produce thinner devices, add battery capacity, increase shock robustness, or improve internal airflow – all better uses of the volume in a system than shipping a partially “empty” 9.5mm 2.5-inch hard drive with only one disk.

Delivering the right balance of power and acoustics, the drives feature 1.8 watts (W) read/write power and 0.55W low power idle, and deliver a nearly silent operation at 1.9 idle / 2.1 seek bels, which is quieter than most ambient noise in a household. All Travelstar Z5K500 drives feature an 8MB cache and a Serial ATA 3Gb per second interface. They are also Hitachi’s second generation Advanced Format drive, which increases the physical sector size on HDDs from 512 bytes to 4,096 (4K) bytes, thereby improving drive capacity and error correction capabilities.

All Hitachi Z-series 7mm drives feature common connectors and mounting points for standard integration into existing systems, and enable greater design flexibility to differentiate and meet market demands for new thinner, lighter and more robust devices.

Security, Reliability, Availability
Travelstar Z-series family features optional bulk data encryption (BDE) for hard drive level data security. When employing BDE, data is scrambled using a key as it is being written to the disk and then descrambled with the key as it is retrieved. The Travelstar Z5K500 drive family will also be offered in Enhanced Availability (EA) models in capacities of 320GB and 500GB, which are designed and fine-tuned for applications needing “always-on” protection in 24×7, low transaction environments including blade servers, network routers, video surveillance and compact RAID systems.

The Travelstar Z5K500 family will be shipping to select distributors in December.

New 500GB Travelstar Z5K500 Enables Sleek, Elegant G-Technology G-DRIVE slim
The G-Technology G-DRIVE slim leverages the new rugged, 7mm Travelstar Z5K500 drive, making it the thinnest 500GB, 2.5-inch external hard drive in the world. With its ultra thin profile and sleek design that complements the Apple® Macbook®, MacBook™ Pro or Macbook Air™, users now have increased capacity in a stylish footprint to help them move, work and play with their digital content. Now at 500GB, the drive has enough room to store Up to 125 hours of high-definition video, 500 hours of standard video, 178 movies, 125,000 4-minute songs or 250 games². Formatted for Macs with simple plug n’ play connectivity, the G-DRIVE slim is Time Machine® ready for added backup protection. It is USB-powered, so there is no need to carry around an extra power cord.

The 500GB G-Technology G-DRIVE slim will be shipping to retailers in early Q1 2011. Pricing has not been set.

“Ultra thin and light devices are, without argument, a growing trend. In order for these innovative designs to live up to their true potential, they need rugged, reliable high-capacity hard drives that can withstand the rigors of a portable environment and satisfy the storage demands of their end users, and Hitachi continues to deliver,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at Hitachi GST. “As the industry’s only 500GB one disk product and the only second generation 7mm product family, Hitachi continues to push the bar higher, and is leading the shift from 9.5mm 2.5-inch drives to 7mm 2.5-inch drives across a broad range of market segments.”

About Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) develops advanced hard disk drives, enterprise-class solid state drives, innovative external storage solutions and services used to store, preserve and manage the world’s most valued data. Founded by the pioneers of hard drives, Hitachi GST provides high-value storage for a broad range of market segments, including Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, Consumer Electronics and Personal Storage. Hitachi GST was established in 2003 and maintains its U.S. headquarters in San Jose, California. For more information, please visit the company’s website at http://www.hitachigst.com.
About Hitachi, Ltd.
Hitachi, Ltd., (NYSE: HIT / TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company with approximately 360,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2009 (ended March 31, 2010) consolidated revenues totaled 8,968 billion yen ($96.4 billion). Hitachi will focus more than ever on the Social Innovation Business, which includes information and telecommunication systems, power systems, environmental, industrial and transportation systems, and social and urban systems, as well as the sophisticated materials and key devices that support them. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company’s website at http://www.hitachi.com.

¹IDC WW 2010-2014 HDD Forecast Update, IDC Doc# 226082, December 2010.
²Actual storage may vary depending on the compression rate applied. Capacities may not be combined.
One GB is equal to one billion bytes, and one TB equals 1,000 GB (one trillion bytes). Actual capacity will vary depending on operating environment and formatting.
Travelstar and G-DRIVE Slim are trademarks of Hitachi GST. Hitachi trademarks are authorized for use in countries and jurisdictions in which Hitachi has the right to market the brands. Hitachi is not liable for third parties’ unauthorized use of Hitachi trademarks. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.

[Hitachi via PR]

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Stylus-friendly capacitive touchscreen developed by Hitachi

Mobile News Desk — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 17:42:30 +0000

Does the thought of removing your gloves to answer a call or send an important message from your touchscreen smartphone in the dead cold winter make you shiver? Perhaps you’ve opted for a stylus and are getting tired of its lack of accuracy?

Clearly, everybody who uses a Smartphone would prefer a capacitive touchscreen over the resistive alternative, as capacitive touchscreens offer much better precision and feedback and the uptake from the capacitive touchsceen divulges its superiority over the other.

However, until recently, the perfect touchscreen that would accept input from a gloved finger as well as a stylus, and be responsive as today’s capacitive screens was a white whale of the cell phone industry, a thing to be dealt with in the future! The capacitive touchscreens currently lack the compatibility with using an input device other than finger.

Hitachi has brought that future in the present, though. At this year’s IFD International conference, Hitachi displayed to the world that it has overcome the problem on their new capacitive touchscreen display by adding a controller chip that detects input from non-conducting items and turns it into capacitance. The end result: an all-purpose display that receives input from any object, which is destined to be popular with phone and tablet manufacturers.

With the versatile touchscreen that accepts input from any device, Hitachi is the first company to have made such a huge breakthrough in the mobile world, which could address the U. S. and European markets; as well as the Asian markets, where handwriting recognition and stylus input are required by many.

Hitachi unfortunately won’t be marketing the device until the end of 2011, so until then, grab your conductive finger-tip gloves from Fivepoint.

SOURCE: Diginfo.tv

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Hitachi reveals 7mm ultra slim drives for mobile devices

Fabrizio Pilato — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 01:54:48 +0000

Hitachi Z-series 7mm Ultra Thin Mobile Hard Drives

With the evolution of portable computing, manufacturers live by several common principals; one of those is making devices an unthinkable size. Staying in line with Seagate’s 7mm Momentus thin 2.5-inch hard disk drives, Hitachi today unveiled their own trio of slim line drives. Upping the anti in respects to storage capacity, Seagate offers a 150GB and 250GB, while Hitachi has announced a 250GB of their own, and has pushed the envelope forward with a 320GB as well.

TheHitach 7200RPM Travelstar Z7K320 with 16MB cache will be geared to high performance portable computers, using only 1.8W of energy during read/write cycles, and 0.8W when idle. The Travelstar Z5K320 with 8MB cache performs slightly slower, but easier on the batteries; only by 0.2W at 1.6W while active, and 0.55W when idle. The third drive is designed for personal video recorders, tablets and other devices which a loud humming would ruin the experience; the Z5K320 CinemaStar. It’s much quieter, ratings are 1.9 bels (19dB) with seek only and roughly 2 bels (20dB) during access times. Hitachi plans to ship these drives in July and August, so look out for newer, slimmer and quieter devices to hit the store shelves in capacities of 320/250/160GB.

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3D LCD to hit mobile devices, Nintendo DS, courtesy of Hitachi

Michael Kwan — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:57:23 +0000

Hitachi to release 3D LCD for mobile devices

3D displays will soon be the norm, and I’m not talking about those expensive 3D TVs destined for living rooms and dens around the world, but 3D in the palm of your hand – without the need for funky glasses.

Hitachi Displays announced today the development of a 3.1-inch 3D LCD that is “optimized” for mobile devices. There’s a good chance that they’ll use it for cell phones and such, but the 3D-ness could be destined for gaming too.

We heard about the Nintendo 3DS was revealed last month, and it seems like this new 3D LCD from Hitachi could be used for that device. The display has a 480 x 854 pixel resolution (“FWVGA”), a 1000:1 contrast ratio, and a 400 cd/m2 brightness ratio. The 3D imagery is “produced by the parallax barrier-based IPS panel.” I think this creates the illusion of depth into the screen rather than having images look like they’re popping out of the screen, but I could be wrong.

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