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In the ongoing effort to squeeze the size of a CD drive to fit into small, portable devices, Koninklijke Philips Electronics reports it is using blue laser technology to miniaturize a drive for an optical disc measuring 1.2 inches in diameter and capable of storing a gigabyte of data.

The company demonstrated Tuesday what it claims is the world's first fully functional prototype optical drive to measure only 2.24 by 1.36 by .3 inches. It can replay audio data on a 1.2-inch optical disc, according to Philips.

The disc's data capacity is 50 percent greater than that of current CD-ROMs, said Koen Joosse, a Philips spokesperson. It was made possible using a blue laser, which has a shorter wavelength than the red lasers used in current optical disc technology. A shorter wavelength means the laser beam can create smaller dots on optical discs, which means more data can fit on a disc.

CDs currently cost less than the flash storage media used in conventional mobile devices such as digital still cameras, phones, and PDAs. Therefore, Philips hopes the small discs will be widely distributed as portable rewritable media, at lower cost than flash media, Joosse said.

Refinements Remain

However, Philips faces "a number of challenges to get optical discs into small devices," said Wolfgang Schlichting, a research manager of removal storage at IDC.

For one thing, optical drives are still costly to install in handheld devices, Schlichting said. The optical drives, which must be larger than the discs themselves, are larger and less convenient to use than flash memory cards. And because optical discs rotate, they consume more power than flash media, he added.

"The technology is still at an early stage, and we cannot determine when this will be commercialized," Philips' Joosse said. The company hopes to shrink the .3-inch height of the drive; the optical disc's 1.2-inch diameter is already small enough for mobile devices, he said.