Infineon Technologies today announced the first complete, single chip, system-on-chip
solution for advanced, TrueX® Multibeam®, DVD drives at the CeBIT Conference in Hannover,
Germany, March 22-28. The 0.18 micron CMOS single-chip DVD-ROM controller will be in shown
in the Afreey, Inc. booth in hall 9 stand D12. Afreey, an optical drive manufacturer, is one
of the first customers of Infineon and its development partners, Sanyo and Zen Research.
Infineon will formally introduce the chip later this year.
The single chip includes analog front end, digital read channels, error correction code,
servo, host interface and high performance DSP/microcontroller. This chip is focused on
high-performance in a small form-factor with low power dissipation and offers dual-layer
data read functionality in DVD. Infineon's future products to provide super high integration
solutions for the optical storage industry will support write-once and fully re-writable
functionality in both CD and DVD formats.
The high performance of the drive solution is based on state-of-the-art, Multibeam optical
storage technology, which is delivered through a collaboration between three companies:
Infineon Technologies, Inc. (Munich), Sanyo Electric Company, Ltd. (Osaka), and Zen
Research, plc. When compared to currently available single beam drives, this multiple-beam
optical storage system boasts greater than 200% higher than average throughput. DVD-ROM
performance and sustained data rates of 25X DVD (over 34 MBytes/sec) and 100X CD (over 15
MBytes/sec) are expected.
Zen Research,delivered the key
intellectual property required to control and process the multiple beams and the resulting
data. Zen silicon designs are centered on a series of parallel processors that implement
Zen's unique parallel approach to optical signal processing. A Zen enabled processor design
accepts input from a Zen Multibeam optical system to simultaneously process and serialize
data read from several tracks of standard CD or DVD media.
Infineon executed the integration of all required drive control and data processing
functions into the chip. This super-high-integration solution, boasting 42 million
transistors, performs the Multiple beam data processing, advanced error detection and
correction, servo motor control and host interface functions.
The chip integrates seven individual read channel processors to perform the Multibeam signal
processing. Also featuring the 100 MHz, 32-bit TriCore(TM) Unified Processor core
architecture, this chip performs all bus and memory management functions and controls the
ATAPI interface to the host. 192kB of configurable memory supports storage of the read data
and operating code and provides on-chip cache. Additionally, the chip supports up to 2MB of
external flash and 8MB of external SDRAM for serial data management.
Afreey, Inc., a leading CD and DVD drive manufacturer, is the first company to combine all
these elements into the world's highest performance optical storage system. The company's
state-of-the-art engineering and manufacturing capabilities are critical in meeting the
strict performance requirements for such a design.