Two new blue-laser HD-DVD formats has been announced

March 26, 2003

The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) of Taiwan together with 28 companies has established the Advanced Optical Storage Research Alliance (AOSRA) whose purpose is to gain control of the intellectual property for the next-generation of blue-laser HD-DVD formats. The new formats will be physically similar to the formats that already exist (Toshiba/NECs format and Blu-Ray) but will use their own proprietary compression, error correction and file formats to avoid infringing of patents.

Taiwanese companies hold 50 percent of the world
market for CD-ROM drives and 40 percent of the market for DVD-ROM drives,
said Der Ray Huang, deputy general director of ITRI and director general
of AOSRA. But most of the associated IP "is owned by European and Japanese
companies, [and] Taiwanese companies have to pay royalties to those
companies," Huang said. "The purpose of AOSRA is to invent IP for new
formats."

**Properties of the new HD-DVD formats**
	HD-DVD-1	HD-DVD-2
Disk diameter	120 mm	120 mm
Substrate thickness	0.6 mm x 2	1.2 mm*
Laser wavelength	405 nm	405 nm
Lens numerical aperture	0.6~0.65	0.85
Track pitch	0.41 Âµm	0.33 Âµm
Minimum pit length	0.222 Âµm	0.176 Âµm
Data transfer rate	25.0 Mbps	31.6 Mbps
User data capacity	17 Gb	27 Gb
Recording	Groove recording	Groove recording

*(protection layer 0.1 mm)

With a total of four competing technologies it looks like the struggle for the next-generation of HD-DVD formats will be even tougher than today's fight about the recordable DVD formats. You can read more about the new blue-laser formats at EE times.

Source: EE Times