Physical Characteristics and Format of Digital Versatile Disc Re-Recordable

Abstract

The digital versatile disc re-recordable (DVD-RW) has been developed as a member of the digital versatile disc (DVD) family. The DVD-RW disc format is obtained by adding the re-writable feature to the DVD recordable (DVD-R) disc format. Therefore DVD-RW disc maintains playback compatibility with DVD-R and DVD read only memory (DVD-ROM). In order to realize this feature, the “groove wobble and land pre-pit method” has been adopted as a pre-formatting method for the DVD-RW disc. The land pre-pit (LPP) is one of the most important factors in DVD-RW discs because the characteristics of the DVD-RW disc are influenced by the LPP design. The characteristics of the DVD-RW disc can be improved by the optimization of the LPP design. Therefore, the LPP should be designed to obtain the best performance of the DVD-RW disc. We investigated optimization of the LPP design and determined the best conditions for a DVD-RW disc structure by optical simulation and experiments. This report focuses on the LPP design and shows the optimum conditions for the DVD-RW disc.