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     This story was printed from CdrInfo.com,

     located at http://www.cdrinfo.com.

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Oak Technology today announced that Mitsumi Electronics, Corporation's new 32X CD-R/RW (Compact Disc Recordable/ReWritable) drive is based on Oak's optical storage controller technology. Mitsumi's drive is targeted for both the retail market and for line fit applications with PC OEMs.

Designed around Oak's OTI-9797S controller, Mitsumi Electronics' CR-480ATE IDE CD-R/RW optical recorder features 32X CD-R write speeds, 12X CD-RW rewriting, a 2 megabyte buffer (16 megabyte option is also available), and utilizes Oak's ExacLink(TM) buffer underrun technology. The drive incorporates the Mt. Rainier standard, developed by Compaq Computer Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics, and Sony Corporation, which enables OEMs to offer drag-and-drop CD rewriting and on-the-fly formatting of the disc. This feature makes CD drives a natural storage replacement of floppy drives. By recording at 32X, Oak 's programmable controller enables the CR-480ATE to record a full 650 Megabyte compact disc in three minutes or less.

``Our 32X drive offers a combination of high performance, reliability and consistently successful results in a cost-effective drive that meets the needs of end users as well as PC OEMs,'' said Yoshinari Yamaguchi, general manager, ODS Division, Mitsumi Electric Co., Ltd. ``Oak's ExacLink technology provided the advanced capabilities we needed in a highly integrated, single-chip controller that helps keep manufacturing costs in line.''

``Affordability, faster write speeds and technology such as the Mt. Rainier standard are driving widespread acceptance of CD-RW drives,'' said Clark Foy, vice president of Product Marketing for Oak's Optical Storage Group. ``Using the Mt. Rainier hardware support incorporated in the OTI-9797S, this 32X Mitsumi drive offers enhanced performance and disc compatibility between computer systems, thus offering consumers a better overall user experience. This is a big plus.''

Oak's OTI-9797S Controller

Oak's OTI-9797S controller is capable of 32X write speeds and 16X rewrite speeds, as well as 48X CD-ROM read speeds. It employs partial and full CAV write and audio DAC/filter circuits that offer the best performance in the industry, plus dyanamic write strategy, 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-9797S integrates a 48X CD-DSP that uses a proprietary slicing technique and digital symmetry control to offer increased frequencies and gain programmability. The OTI-9797S 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 32X and allows CD encoding at all legacy speeds from 1X to 32X.