Why didn't this OAKT news hit the business wires...it was only in trade news?
Oak gets rid of dead wood
Electronic Buyers News, Friday, December 05, 1997 at 22:55
(Published on Monday, December 08, 1997 at 00:00)
by Mark Hachman
Silicon Valley- Continuing the effort to reduce its costs, Oak
Technology Inc. has eliminated a third-party component in its CD-ROM
controller, replacing it with Oak's own integrated core.
Previously, the CD-DSP function in Oak's OTI CD-ROM controllers was
manufactured by Sony Semiconductor Corp. of America.
The new OTI-9325 24x CD-ROM controller integrates the DSP, servo,
block decoder, and audio processor on a single chip.
Oak continues to develop high-end products that push the limits of
performance to 40x, said Aydin Koc, vice president and general manager
of the optical storage unit. The company's strategy is to quickly
follow up those products with lower-cost integrated controllers at 24x
and soon 32x, Koc added.
The OTI-9325 contains features that reduce CD-ROM seek times as much
as 20 milliseconds from previous generations, according to Dan
Stevenson, marketing manager at Oak's Optical Storage Business Unit,
Sunnyvale, Calif.
As the CD-ROM drive searches for the proper bit of information, the
head must first estimate its distance away from the proper data track
as it quickly moves toward or away from the center of the disk in a
"rough seek" mode.
When the head nears the appropriate track, the chip tells the head to
enter a fine-seek mode, literally counting the tracks as it nears the
data. The newly integrated DSP and servo controller include
acceleration loop profiling and a lens-centering control, reducing
those seek times across a wider area of the disk. The OTI-9325's
fine-seek mode begins within plus/minus 2,048 tracks of the target.
In addition, the chip includes an integrated audio processor with
stereo DAC. The other portion of the chip, the block decoder, is based
on the existing OTI-912.
The chip ships in a 160-pin PQFP and will be sampling in January for
$10 in 10,000s. |
