Seagate 2006 Annual Report Download - page 12

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Table of Contents
precious metals and scarce alloys such as platinum and ruthenium. As our product offerings have transitioned to
perpendicular recording technology, we have increased inventory of these precious metals and scarce alloys and may
continue to be required to increase inventory over time.
Printed Circuit Boards.
We assemble and test a significant portion of the printed circuit boards used in our disc
drives. Printed circuit boards are the boards that contain the electronic circuitry and ASICs that provide the electronic
controls of the disc drive and on which the head-
disc assembly is mounted. We assemble printed circuit boards at our
facilities in Malaysia and China.
Spindle Motors. We participate in the design of many of our spindle motors and purchase them principally
from outside vendors in Asia, whom we have licensed to use our intellectual property and technology.
ASICs. We participate in the design of many of the ASICs used in our disc drives for motor and actuator
control, such as interface controllers, read/write channels and pre-amplifiers. We do not manufacture any ASICs but,
rather, buy them from third-party suppliers.
Disc Drive Assembly. Following the production of the individual components of the disc drive, the first step in
the manufacture of a disc drive itself is the assembly of the actuator arm, read/write heads, discs and spindle motor in
a housing to form the head-disc assembly. The production of the head-disc assembly involves largely automated
processes. Printed circuit boards are then mated to the head-disc assembly and the completed unit is tested prior to
packaging and shipment. Disc drive assembly and test operations occur primarily at facilities located in China,
Singapore and Thailand. We perform subassembly and component manufacturing operations at our facilities in
China, Malaysia, Northern Ireland, Singapore, Thailand, and in the United States, in California and Minnesota. In
addition, third parties manufacture and assemble components for us in various Asian countries, including China,
Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, in Europe and the United States.
Products
We offer a broad range of disc drive products for the enterprise, mobile computing, desktop, consumer
electronics and branded solutions markets of the disc drive industry. We now produce perpendicular recording
technology based products for all major markets described below, with products shipping for revenue in all major
markets in fiscal year 2007. Currently, the majority of our disc drive unit shipments are perpendicular recording
technology based products. In addition, we have recently announced our intention to introduce SSD products for
select markets in the future.
We offer more than one product within each product family, and differentiate products on the basis of
price/performance and form factor, the dimensions of the disc drive, capacity, or interface. Historically, our industry
has been characterized by continuous and significant advances in technology, which contributed to rapid product life
cycles. We list below our main current product offerings.
Enterprise Storage
Cheetah SCSI/SAS/Fibre Channel Family. Our Cheetah 3.5-inch disc drives ships in 10,000 and 15,000 RPM
and in storage capacities ranging from 36GB to 400GB. Commercial uses for Cheetah disc drives include Internet
and e-commerce servers, data mining and data warehousing, mainframes and supercomputers, department/enterprise
servers and workstations, transaction processing, professional video and graphics and medical imaging.
Savvio SCSI/SAS/Fibre Channel Family. Savvio, our 2.5-inch enterprise disc drives, first introduced in fiscal
year 2004, designed to enable space optimization, maximized performance and availability, ships in 10,000 and
15,000 RPM and in storage capacities ranging from 36GB to 146GB. This disc drive is our first enterprise disc drive
in the smaller 2.5-inch form factor and, as such, allows the installation of more disc drives per square foot, thus
facilitating faster access to data. We believe that end-user customers are increasingly adopting the smaller 2.5-inch
form factor enterprise class disc drives. We are currently shipping our 2nd generation Savvio disc drive which
utilizes perpendicular recording technology with increased throughput and improved power consumption, allowing
improved space optimized enterprise storage systems.
Barracuda ES SATA Family. Our Barracuda ES 3.5-inch disc drives using perpendicular recording technology
ships in 7,200 RPM and in storage capacities ranging from 250GB to 750GB. The Barracuda ES
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