DVD Recorder Drive

Rapid market expansion following adoption of DVD drives as a standard PC component

Applications that produce data such as documents with layout information and digital photographs have led to an increase in the amount of data that must be handled by PCs. Portable storage media used to save data have evolved from floppy disks to MO (Magnetic Optical disks) to larger media such as recordable CDs. Since the popularization of video, increasing numbers of people are handling large volumes of data on their PCs, and recordable DVDs have become the main storage medium.

A recordable DVD drive is the peripheral device used to write data to a recordable DVD. There are multiple write standards, such as DVD-R, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, DVD+R, and DVD+RW. However, the price of drives that support multiple standards has gone down in recent years. The number of shipped units continues to increase, since drives are now being installed not only in PCs but also in DVD recorders, for which the market is exploding. Recordable DVD can now be described as a standard optical drive installed on PCs.

Continued pursuit of greater cost performance

What end-users want from their recordable DVD drives can be summarized as follows.

One approach to improving the cost performance of drives is to reduce the number of semiconductor devices mounted on the board, by integrating as many semiconductors as possible. NEC Electronics was one of the first to address this issue. At the same time, we have steadily optimized logic to further boost cost performance by, for example, reducing chip size without changing processes.

NEC Electronics was among the first to market multi-function LSIs allowing multiple options for reading and writing, and still commands a large market share in this field. For operation speed, we were also quick to support a x16 write speed in all specifications, and offered stable write operations at resolutions of up to 1/32T. We are committed to maintaining our leading position in the market, while continuing to offer high quality and high performance.

In terms of multi-functional devices, we offer all types of drives: for power savings aimed at battery-operated mobile equipment; for adding copyright protection capability for use in DVD recorders; and for supporting Serial-ATA, a new interface for PC storage.

For power savings in particular, a pin-compatible, 3.3 V drive has been added to the RF lineup (analog processing LSI). This product allows products to be designed without changing the board design by simply replacing the battery-operated device, such as the drive of a laptop PC, with a new chip. Also, products that provide an MPEG encoding/decoding function based on EMMA architecture will be soon available for use in low-priced DVD recorders. These semiconductor devices are of course lead-free for environmentally conscious users.

Have released pin-compatible 3.3V RF (analog) LSIs.
Allows mobile devices to be designed just by replacing, without changing the substrate design.
The following diagram shows a roadmap for major semiconductors for recordable DVD drives.

NEC Electronics will continue to lead the industry by for example supporting next-generation, high capacity drives suitable for writing with a blue laser, and enhancing our capabilities to offer all the semiconductor products that compose storage DVD drives.

Figure 1:Major recordable DVD drive components

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