Beefed-up slim drive Matsushita pushes slim drive to notebooks By Yoshiko Hara, EE Times Tokyo -- In an effort to beef up sales of its rewritable PD drives, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. has introduced a slim external version for notebook computers. The company hopes to triple the market for its unique drive technology this year, its last chance to gain a foothold before DVD-RAM comes along. The PD drive system, neither CD nor DVD, uses a 12-cm phase-change disk with 650-Mbyte capacity. Compatible with the compact disk, it can replace a CD-ROM but also provides rewritable, removable storage. "We developed the PD system so that it will make [a] smooth transition to DVD-RAM," said Toshikazu Yosumi, director of Matsushita's optical-disk systems division. "The cartridges of PD and DVD-RAM have the same external dimensions." Matsushita devised the basic technology for DVD-RAM and sees the digital video disk as another mainstay for its optical-disk division. Although PD compatibility is not part of the DVD format, Matsushita is guaranteeing that its own DVD-RAM drives will have full PD compatibility. "The PD system will have a longer life in the storage market before the transition to DVD-RAM, because PD will maintain an advantage in cost over DVD-RAM for long time," Yosumi said. "Matsushita expects that the PD market will jump three times, to 1.5 million units this year." Introduced in 1995, the PD drive sold about 500,000 units in its first year but hovered at the same level last year, said Yosumi. The problem was a steep price drop for the CD-ROM drives that PD units are designed to replace. The OEM price of CD-ROM drives sank "to the range of $80 to $90," he said, acknowledging that "last year was a difficult one for PD systems." Several factors make him optimistic this year. The blooming digital-camera market is one strong sign of growing demand for large-capacity storage, Yosumi said. Moreover, the three major PC vendors--Compaq Computer, IBM and NEC Corp.--have already incorporated PD drives in their personal computers. In addition, NEC and Teac Corp. have signed on as second sources. "About 1 million units will ship from Matsushita this year," Yosumi said, "while the rest will be supplied by licensees." (Next article.) (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]

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