December
3


Toshiba announced the latest additions of 2.5-inch hard disk drives for automotive applications: an 80GB drive offering the industry’s largest capacity, and a 40GB drive. The drives will be used in such applications as car navigation systems, and will be released in industrial and retail versions. Toshiba’s automotive HDD have earned an unrivaled reputation for environmental toughness and performance, and made the company the leader in the world automotive HDD market. With its latest drives, the company has further enhanced durability and increased data capacity, using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) to boost areal recording density and to raise storage capacity to 80GB (MK8050GAC and MK8050GACE), double that of Toshiba’s current automotive drives.

The new Toshiba drives can operate at up to 5,500m above sea level, 1,200m higher than current automotive models. In addition to map data information for car navigation, the new Toshiba automotive HDD can be used in on-board entertainment systems, to store high capacity movie, digital image and music files. Sample shipping of the drives has started and mass production will start in March 2008.

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December
3


Toshiba has developed and delivered the world’s first operational weather radar system that replaces electron tubes in the transmitter with a high-power semiconductor module. The new radar is only one sixth the size of conventional equipment but offers comparable output power, along with improved waveband efficiency and enhanced features. The first unit of the new system has been installed at the Hydrospheric Atmospheric Research Center at Nagoya University, Japan. The Nagoya radar operates in the 9GHz frequency band (X-band) and is the first solid-state weather radar to go into practical operation. While the new weather radar is much more compact and offers much higher performance than conventional systems, it maintains the same level of output power by adopting a combination of gallium nitride (GaN) power field effect transistors (FET) and pulse compression technology, which strengthens peak output power. Implementation of fully digital data processing suppresses the spurious level, allowing the frequency separation required for interference suppression to be shortened to one fourth. This contributes to efficient use of crowded radio frequencies.

As the new radar does not use electron tubes, which have to be periodically replaced and disposed of, it reduces environmental loads, meeting Toshiba’s goal of maximizing the eco-efficiency of its products and systems.Toshiba will market the new high-power semiconductor-based weather radar in both 9GHz band (X-band) and 5GHz band (C-band) versions, both in Japan and overseas, including sales of individual modules that build the system.

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November
2


Toshiba today announced the launch of a new digital video recorder RD-A301 (DVR) with HD DVD drive that integrates key new features that bring greater freedom of recording to the HD DVD, including recording of HD video to standard DVD discs. The Toshiba RD-A301 with 300GB built in hard disk integrates an HD Transcoder that converts MPEG2 video, the standard for digital HD broadcasts, to MPEG4 AVC, a high-efficiency video compression technology that supports longer recording times while maintaining picture quality. The DVR also supports “HD Rec”, which facilitates recording of HD video on conventional DVD discs, such as DVD-R discs. “HD Rec” allows a single-layer 4.7GB DVD-R disc to store up to two hours of HD video, working in combination with HD Transcoder.

The Toshiba RD-A301 measures 430mm x 69 mm x 375 mm weigh 6.1kg and will be available in the Japanese market in the middle of December, and advance orders will be accepted from November 1.

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