Zen Research Inc, a Cupertino, California company based in the old headquarters of Apple Computer Inc, has come up with a new technology it believes will speed up CD and DVD optical disk so that they are faster than current hard disk technology. It believes its approach – which works within existing CD standards – could propel CDs into a dominant position as the single drive needed for PC systems, the space that companies such as Iomega Corp, Syquest Inc and Terastor Inc are currently fighting so hard to control. Zen reckons it can get up to 15GB on a single platter. Current speed-ups in CD drives rely on ever-faster rotation, currently up to 32 times the original speed. But the thing that makes CDs so cheap to produce is that they don’t need to be perfectly round or balanced, and therefore rotation speeds much higher than the current limits are impractical. Instead, Zen has come up with a way of reading multiple tracks in parallel with an optical drive component and chipset it’s calling TrueX. True X reads data through constant linear velocity, rather than the constant angular velocity used by most other drives, which reach their top speeds only on the outermost tracks. Kenwood Corp is the first drive manufacturer to admit to taking the technology, though Zen says it has several companies signed up. Kenwood’s product, not yet shipping, will be marketed as a true 40 times drive, offering 6.1Mb/sec transfer rates and access times of 80 milliseconds. Zen says it has more technology in the pipeline that will further speed up access times, using optical technology that illuminates a spot on the disk with high intensity light and then reads the shadows of the pits on the disk, but that system will benefit from the use of blue, rather than red laser light technology, due to hit the market around the year 2000. A third technology, which uses a multiple tracking device to split read and write access, is intended for DVD-RAM products. Zen is a four year-old privately held company with a Dutch parent and research labs in Isreal, but has some undisclosed large Japanese investors behind it. It goes to a nearly chip manufacturer to fabricate its chips, which it sells on to its OEMs along with paper design details. Drives using the new technology will be more expensive than existing CD drives, but volume production would cut those prices quite quickly, says Zen.

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