Agere has begun shipping a new 90-nanometer TrueStore read channel that features the industry’s lowest power consumption and highest performance within the market for handheld consumer electronics.

The TrueStore RC1300 uses half the electrical current required by the previous generation of read channels in this market segment, extending the battery life of electronic devices. The new channel increases storage capacity by speeding the data transmission rate by 25 percent and boosting the signal-to-noise ratio over the previous generation of channel.

The TrueStore RC1300 targets the 1.8-inch and smaller HDD form factor that provides critical data storage of 20 to 160 gigabytes in a wide variety of consumer devices, including MP3 players, portable media players and digital camcorders. With its smaller die size, RC1300 enables consumer device makers to develop smaller and more creative designs for handheld devices.

“The TrueStore RC1300 achieves two difficult objectives: it enables greater storage capacity while at the same time dramatically reducing power consumption. Moreover it accomplishes this at an ultra-small size that gives disk drive manufacturers and device makers greater freedom to be creative in their form-factor designs,” said Ruediger Stroh, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Agere’s Storage division.

A read channel encodes and decodes data and ensures the accuracy of all data read from or written to a disk drive. Read channels act as the linchpin of custom storage systems-on-a-chip (SoCs), which combine multiple functions, including hard disk controller, serial interface and memory, on a single chip.

Agere expects the TrueStore RC1300 to be in production in 2008.