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Philips develops drive to run tiny CDs
Thursday, June 20 2002
by Andrew McLindon


Philips has demonstrated an optical disc drive that uses a disc just 3cm in
diameter, but is capable of storing more information than a standard CD.

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.