|
 The consumer electronics giant said that the discs can store up to 1GB of data and, at just 5.5cm x 3.4cm x 0.75cm in size, the disc drive that reads them is suitable for use in portable devices such as digital cameras, mobile phones and PDAs. Philips also said it was working to further shrink the drive.
According to Philips, this progression has partly been made possible by recent advances in blue laser technology. Blue lasers have shorter wavelengths than red lasers, which are used in current optical CD drives to read data off discs.
Philips also said that it has been able to radically reduce the size of optical disc drive systems, particularly the building-height of the drives, which is seen as crucial given the space constraints of portable devices.
The main factor determining the building height of optical disc drives is the optical objective lens system. Philips said that it had developed the world's smallest objective lens for blue laser recording, which allowed it condense the height of the drive to 7.5mm. The typical height in current drives is 12.5mm.
The lens was made of plastic, instead of glass, which, according to Philips, allows for greater design freedom and hence a smaller drive height. Another step was the development of an ultra-thin version of the actuator that positions and focuses the laser beam onto the optical disc.
Using these miniature key components, a fully functional prototype optical drive of 5.6cm x 3.4cm x 0.75 cm was developed. The demonstrator set-up, with the driving electronics currently still on a separate board, successfully played back MP3 data from a 3cm diameter optical disc, said Philips in a statement.
Philips is one of nine companies in the Blu-ray Disc Founder group, which is pushing a new blue laser format for standard-sized CDs that will increase their capacity to 27GB. Other members of the group include Hitachi, Sharp, Sony and Pioneer.
|
