matsushita bases 5x drive on chip set headed for
merchant debut -- dvd-rom drive reads dvd-ram
August 4, 1998
ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING TIMES via
NewsEdge Corporation : Tokyo - Matsushita has
developed a chip set that can serve as the basis of
a 5x DVD-ROM disk drive and that the company
says is the first chip set in the industry to allow
DVD-ROM drives to read DVD-RAM disks. The chip
set has been designed into a DVD-RAM-capable
DVD-ROM drive from Matsushita Kotobuki that will
ship in OEM volumes in the next few weeks.
The second-generation chip set comprises an
optical-disk controller, a servo DSP, an analog
signal-processing front end and a DVD-RAM
playback IC. The optical-disk controller, fabricated
on a 0.35-micron process, integrates Matsushita's
AM30 32-bit microcontroller with 4 Mbits of DRAM
and error-correction circuitry.
The embedded DRAM connects to a 64-bit bus. To
take advantage of the high-speed data transfer from
the DRAM, the internal I/O bus was divided into
three independent buses.
Embedded DRAM eliminated the need for an
external DRAM interface, thereby curtailing power
consumption. Power management provided by the
embedded microcontroller further cuts power
requirements. The optical-disk controller consumes
only one-third as much power as its predecessor,
according to Matsushita.
The chip set as a whole lowers power consumption
to 1.4 W from the 2.55 W of the first-generation chip
set. That offering, introduced last year, consisted of
five chips, including external DRAM.
The DVD-RAM playback IC, meanwhile, lets
DVD-ROM drives read DVD-RAM disks for the first
time, according to the company. Proponents of
DVD+ R/W-a non-DVD rewritable format proposed
by six companies led by Sony Corp.-have said that
the cost of such a chip would be prohibitively high
and would thus hamper DVD-RAM's market
penetration. But Matsushita says it intends to offer
the full chip set for about $50.
"The cost for the chip set will not be higher than that
of the first generation, without the IC," a spokesman
said.
Matsushita plans to ship samples in October and
will begin volume production of 300,000 to 500,000
units a month before the end of the year. Capacity
will climb to 1 million units a month next year.
Meanwhile, Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics
Industries (Osaka) is offering samples of its new
DVD-RAM-capable DVD-ROM drive in Japan at
30,000 yen per unit. Matsushita claims the drive is
the industry's first to be " compatible with
DVD-RAM media" conforming to the DVD-RAM
standard.
The SR-8583 is also compatible with CD-ROM and
recordable CD (CD-R and CD-RW) media. It reads
DVD-ROM disks at the 5x speed and CD-ROM
disks at the 32x speed.
Copyright - 1998 CMP Media Inc.
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