The majority of CD-ROM drives available on the market today are designed to meet the Multimedia PC Level 2 (MPC2) specification. The MPC2 specification, developed by the Multimedia PC Marketing Council, was designed to give a minimum level of system functionality for a PC based multimedia system. However this was just a minimum specification. This paper looks at how the requirements of multimedia are driving CD-ROM drives beyond this level of performance. It describes how the demands of video, audio and high volume data applications are pushing CD-ROM drives to handle four and eight times speed, with data rates up to 1.2Mbytes/sec, along with improved access times. The Philips Semiconductors highly integrated CD-ROM solution is presented, which demonstrates how this increase in performance is achieved, and how a core system is expanded to produce a family of CD-ROM drives that can attach to a variety of interfaces, such as SCSI, Enhanced IDE, and PCMCIA.
Chris Lewis and Mike James both work in the Product Concept and Application Lab of Philips Semiconductors, Southampton. They are involved in the development of CD-ROM systems and specifically in the design of block decoders. Chris has been with the lab for two years after graduating from the University of Surrey with a MEng in Information System Engineering. Mike graduated from Southampton University with a BSc in Electronic Engineering and worked at Philips Research Labs, Redhill for five years before joining the lab in 1989.