NEC Electronics Ltd. announced today the establishment of a development center in Taiwan, which will be responsible for the development of firmware the company's upcoming LSI chips for optical storage devices.

The center will develop firmware for the NEC's new LSI chips that will be used in the upcoming Blu-ray and DVD drives. In addition, it will be responsible for the marketing activities related to the optical storage business of NEC in Asia.

LSI's play a basic role in the design of an optical disc drive since they are responsible for the processing of the various signals, essentially controlling the laser, servo, data reading, error correction and other operations.

NEC Electronics has deep experience with the development and commercialization of signal processing LSIs in the optical disc drive field. The company released its first LSI for CD recording and DVD playback in 2001.