Royal Philips Electronics has announced a highly integrated chipset, optical pickup unit (OPU), firmware and reference design for the industry's highest-speed DVD+R/RW (DVD+Recordable/ReWriteable) recorders. This means that optical drive manufacturers targeting the PC industry can bring consumer products to market quickly. The Philips DVD design also incorporates new technology to minimize recording errors caused by common disk defects such as fingerprints.

The software and chipset, based on Philips Nexperia streaming media technology, will allow consumers to create 4.7 GByte DVDs of home videos, photo albums and PC data at speeds of up to 8X in less than 15 minutes or half the time of existing drives. Designed primarily for PC use, the Nexperia DVD+R/RW system solution is capable of supporting record speeds up to 8x.

This leap forward in recording speed is achieved by a new approach to optical recorder design: Philips moved the write strategy generator (WSG) to the same board as the laser driver, eliminating the data bottleneck that limited recording speed. The new design also supports disk reading during the record process, which in turn supports a Philips innovation, eliminating most recording errors caused by common defects on the disc surface, and ensures higher levels of compatibility with legacy DVD players. A sample kit, including a PNX7850 DVD processor, TZA1039 analog processor, TZA1047 laser power controller and an OPU66.20 optical pickup unit, is available now. The kit will cost $65 each in volumes of 100,000 units. Volume production is scheduled for Q1, 2003.