An application of OFDM method to optical disc recording

An application of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) method to optical disc recording/readout is presented. OFDM has been widely used in the field of telecommunication owing to its highly efficient frequency usage. However OFDM has not been applied to optical disc recording because it is a multiple data transfer method and needs to record analog signals. Partial Response Maximum Likelihood (PRML) used in the current optical disc systems requires a certain kind of analog recording. Although optical recording usually creates binary marks, it is possible to obtain arbitrary analog readout signals by using PWM method. Another technique to generate analog signals using the oversampled binary recording is described and applied to multiple level recording. In addition, it is found that the level adjustment of multiple carriers for OFDM leads to the advantage when it is applied to the optical disc system. Using the simple transfer function model of the optical disc system, two types of readout signals using PRML and OFDM are calculated and then their qualities are compared. Since Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) method can be combined with OFDM, it is possible to increase the recoding density of optical disc systems. A method employing OFDM with 64-QAM and the pre-enhance method to the high frequency carrier shows an ability of 1.5 times recording density of the conventional Bru-ray Disc (BD).