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To: John Rieman who wrote (34869)	8/4/1998 11:28:00 AM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

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. <<ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING TIMES -- 08-03-98, p. PG33>>