Motors & Drives Information

Pair of CD-rewritable chips added to growing portfolio

Fremont, Calif. -- Striving to keep its position as one of the leaders in the optical storage market, Cirrus rolled out a pair of chips for CD-rewritable (CD-RW) drives. The chips are claimed to offer a zippy 40X CD-ROM performance read speed and 10X CD-RW performance write speed.

Dubbed the CR3470 and CR3475, both chips will enable systems makers to create CD-RW drives claimed to more than double the speeds of current generation CD-RW drives. CD-RW drives allow users to store data on a CD by "phase changing" the CD.

The data can then be erased, and used again with new data if the user needs to. Phase change technology consists of CD-RW discs that have a layer of die on the disc that changes states when the right laser hits the surface. A laser to record data and a laser to erase data change the states of this layer, changing the state of the CD-RW disc. This is unlike CD-R technology where a laser "burns" the information into the disc once and can't be erased.

"We are predicting that CD-RW drives are going to be very strong for the next few years because of the DVD recordable format wars going on," said Mark Gaare, marketing manager for optical storage at Cirrus Logic. "All those different formats being discussed will stimulate the growth for CD-RW for awhile. With floppy drives pretty much dead, removable drives are becoming the way of the future and CD formats make it much easier than Zip drives."

Cirrus claims the CR3475 is the first CD-RW chip that is able to read DVD discs as well as read, write and overwrite CD discs. The CR3475 adds a DVD port that allows for this bridge to reading DVD drives. The port allows the CD-RW drive to read and play DVD discs as well as all CD-ROM discs. "Normally you would need a separate drive to do both but now you can do it in the same drive," said Mr. Gaare.

Cirrus claims both devices are three times faster than Zip drives, are the first CD-RWs to perform at CD-ROM speeds of 40X and are more than twice as fast as normal CD-RW devices writing to discs at a speed of 10X. The fastest write speed up for current generation CD-RW technology is 4X and current read speed in CD-RWs is approximately 8X, Cirrus said. Both CD-RW devices allow for a storage capacity of up to 670MB, which Cirrus equates to more than 400 floppy disks or six Zip disks worth of data.

# posted by Medical Information : 3:33 AM