NEC Develops High Definition DVD Compatible Drive

by News Editor
Published on Dec 19, 2003 12:00 AM



NEC Corporation has announced development of technology capable of recording and playing back of current DVD’s and High Definition, High Density DVD’s with a single optical head. The spread of high-resolution digital images, big-screen displays, and the start of terrestrial digital TV broadcasting necessitate high-resolution DVD’s with 4 times the storage capacity of current DVD’s.

Compatibility with the current DVD format is important consideration factor, and with existing technology that requires two optical heads to play/record both current and HD-DVD’s. NEC’s success in creating a device with a single optical head enables production of smaller, thinner and low cost HD DVD’s.

NEC uses two lasers, the blue laser diode and the red laser diode, as the light source, thus enabling both current DVD and HD DVD discs to be played on a single objective lens. They’ve overcome physical format difference between DVD and HD DVD by developing large scale LSI.

NEC and Toshiba have proposed jointly developed next-generation large-capacity DVD (HD DVD) technology, which has blue laser diodes (LDs) as its light source, as the next-generation DVD format to the DVD Forum. Two HD DVD format specifications are currently being created. One is the ROM (read-only-memory) disc with 15GB of storage capacity on a single layer, and the second is 30GB on dual layers and the other is the rewritable disc with 20GB of storage capacity. In November, the DVD Forum's steering committee approved the proposed HD DVD-ROM format in version 0.9.