"...Oak Technology today announced the industry's first 24X Compact Disc - Recordable/ReWritable (CD-R/RW) optical storage controller to support Constant Angular Velocity, a writing technique that achieves faster write seek times and reduces overall recording time by maintaining a constant rotation speed. The new controller is also the first to implement support for the pending Mt. Rainier standard in hardware for best performance, and it integrates Oak's patent pending ExacLink buffer underrun protection, thus providing one of the highest functionality CD-R/RW controllers on the market.

The OTI-9797 controller is capable of 24X CD-R and 24X CD-RW write speeds as well as 40X CD-ROM read speeds, and it provides an upgrade path to 32X recording speeds. The OTI-9797 is designed for use in PC-based or consumer audio CD-R/RW applications.

The OTI-9797 employs dynamic write strategy, plus partial and full Constant Angular Velocity (CAV) write and audio DAC/filter circuits that offer the best performance in the industry while allowing a high degree of programability and flexibility in the implementation of CD-R and CD-RW write strategies. In addition to a highly automated block decoder/encoder, the OTI-9797 integrates a 40X CD-DSP that uses an advanced slicing technique and digital symmetry control to offer increased frequencies and gain programmability. Its digital CD servo provides highly accurate and advanced track counting, enabling the unit to jump an exact number of tracks - up to 2047 tracks - to substantially reduce seek time. The CD wobble servo block supports speeds up to 24X and allows CD encoding at all legacy speeds from 1X to 24X. To minimize system design costs for OEMs, Oak plans to release a pin-compatible 32X version of this device later this year as the market continues to progress to higher speed CD recording devices.

The Mt. Rainier standard enables native OS support of data storage on CD-RW. This makes the technology far easier to use and allows the replacement of the floppy. This is done by: (i) having defect management in the drive, (ii)making the drive 2k addressable, (iii) using background formatting, and (iv) by standardizing both command set and physical layout.

Oak is breaking speed barriers and improving write seek times in the OTI-9797 controller by employing linear CAV writing, a technique that provides better overall performance than Zoned Constant Linear Velocity (Z-CLV). Traditional controller designs write at a fixed rate using CLV by actually slowing the rotation of the disc when writing to the outer tracks. With CAV, the disc spin rate can be held constant with the data stream adjusted instead. Writing starts at the inner track at the same speed as a CLV method, but the write speed can then increase steadily until the maximum capability of the laser and media is reached. By employing this approach, Oak is able to maintain faster overall disc rotation speeds and better overall performance than solutions that use Zoned CLV.

Oak's OTI-9797 provides a high level of integration that includes an Ultra DMA IDE/ATAPI controller and USB1.1 interface. It uses digital processing techniques to minimize the amount of required analog circuitry, providing increased flexibility and greater immunity to system noise. An advanced architecture affords reduced error rates, greater seek accuracy, and improved seek access time. Power management is provided to reduce power consumption and increase power efficiency.

Oak's OTI-9797 controller is sampling now and will be available in production quantities in September 2001. The controller is priced at $15 each in sample quantities, and under $10 each in production quantities of 10,000..."