Multi Optical Pick-up Units for Enhanced Sensing in Optical Drives: A Novel Parallel Architecture

Abstract

Optical disk (OD) and drive (ODD) are important interfaces used for recording digital streams of bits that represent multimedia with analog nature or discrete data. Enhancing the ODDs in terms of reading/writing (operation) speed is vital as multi-layer (ML) ODs with high capacities are available in the market. This paper presents a simple strategy to enhance operation speed in ODDs by multi optical pick-up unit (MOPU) that leads to surprisingly higher transfer rates. The main considerations with dierent working modes plus theoretical and physical upper bounds are studied. To keep compatibility, the MOPU method is independent of the OD types or optical lens (OL) designs and based on the ODD hardware placement, so all ODs will be also readable at higher rates. Paper also discusses improvements achieved in experimental results based on prototypes.