Sacramento-based KeyEye Communi-cations Inc., a startup maker of chips for telecommunications gear, is opening a design center in Irvine headed by a former developer at Broad-com Corp.
KeyEye is looking to develop products that transfer data at 10 gigabits per second, the new high-speed standard. The company said it put its design center in Irvine because of the area’s workforce trained in digital communications product.
Alan Kwentus, KeyEye’s vice president of digital signal processing technology development, is set to manage the design center.
Kwentus recently joined KeyEye from Irvine chipmaker Broadcom, where he headed development of the company’s satellite physical layer technologies.
“To design advanced transceivers that deliver 10 gigabits per second performance over existing copper-based media, we need access to veteran designers of high-speed digital communication devices,” Kwentus said in a statement.
KeyEye was started in 2001 and is backed by venture capital investors.
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Western Digital drive: competes with offerings from Seagate, Toshiba |
Western Dig Goes Small
Lake Forest-based Western Digital Corp., a maker of computer disk drives, is going smaller.
The company recently unveiled a line of 1-inch drives for use in consumer electronics. The company is hoping that booming sales of digital music players, cameras and handheld computers will drive demand for the tiny drives.
Handheld devices “will be the most explosive growth area for hard drives,” said John Monroe, a research vice president at market tracker Gartner Inc.
“Hard-drive enabled MP3 players already are becoming ubiquitous,” he said. “By 2008, at least 8% of mobile phones could contain a hard drive. These are enormous new markets. It now seems likely that 1-inch hard drive shipments exceeded 8 million units in 2004, up from only 903,000 units in 2003. The compound annual growth rate for 1-inch hard drives should exceed 85% through 2008.”
Up to now, Western Digital has been absent from the handheld device market. Most of its drives go into computers, as well as digital video recorders and Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox video game console.
Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod music player uses drives from Western Digital rivals, Seagate Technology and Toshiba Corp.
The move is the latest expansion play for Western Digital. The company jumped back into the market for laptop computer drives in the fall.
Western Digital made mobile drives in the early 1990s but exited the market by 1997 amid competition from IBM Corp. and Toshiba, which made drives for their own portable computers.
Street Logic
Aliso Viejo-based QLogic Corp. is getting back into Wall Street’s good graces after a year of drops in its stock price.
Following the company’s strong recent quarterly earnings report earlier this month, several analysts upgraded the stock.
Andrew Neff, an analyst with Bear Stearns & Co., raised his rating on QLogic to “outperform” from “peer perform.”
According to MarketWatch, Neff said the company’s “business dynamics appear to have improved.”
Les Santiago, an analyst with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, bumped up his view on QLogic to “outperform” from “market perform” thanks to signs that demand for the company’s products for data storage networks is growing.
QLogic posted a 24% gain in profits for the quarter ended Dec. 26, thanks to sales of its fiber channel products for data storage networks. QLogic earned $43.4 million in the quarter, up from $35 million a year earlier. Sales were up 9% to $150 million.
Excluding charges, QLogic would have made $45 million, just above what analysts were expecting for the quarter. Revenue also came in slightly above expectations.
Sales of fiber channel products,circuit boards and boxes that link data storage computers on a network,grew 8% to $117 million, or nearly 80% of QLogic’s total sales.
This is a marked turnaround for QLogic, which saw its stock decline from a high last January of $46 to $22 last August.
