A Low-Power Laser Driver for the Portable Blue Optical Disc Drive

摘要

A Portable Blue optical disc drive intended for application in portable devices was developed. It uses discs of only 28 mm in diameter having a capacity of 1 GB. To study the power consumption on a system level, a power model was developed, comprising the entire drive electronics. This model shows that a peak power consumption of 1 W and an average power consumption of less than 50 mW are feasible for specific applications, provided that dedicated low-power electronics is used. Therefore, a low-power laser driver was developed, which, moreover, is sufficiently flexible to allow the use of low-power write strategies. The low power consumption of the laser driver is achieved by minimising the amount of circuitry used, the supply voltages and the clock frequencies. Test silicon was produced in a 0.18 μm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process. The IC, with an area of 0.24 mm~2, consumes 19mW.