Philips Demonstrates Small Form Factor Optical Storage

Philips, a founding member of the Blu-ray Disc specification, has demonstrated a fully functional, miniature optical disc drive capable of storing up to 1GB. The disc is 3cm in diameter and can store up to 1GB of data on a single side. Typical CD-ROMs and DVDs are 12cm in diameter. CD-ROMs hold up to 650MB in a single layer; single-sided DVDs hold up to 4.6GB. The new miniature disc is perfect for small devices, such as PDAs.

The disc drive takes advantage of blue-laser technology, which is part of the Blu-ray Disc specification. Currently, optical CD-ROM drives use red lasers. Blue lasers, which have shorter wavelengths than red lasers, produce more condensed data. Blu-ray Disc founders hope to store up to 27GB on a disk the same size as a typical CD-ROM. Blu-ray Disc founders include Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung Electronics, Sharp, Sony, and Thomson Multimedia.

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