TDK Electronics Corp says it has made a breakthrough in phase- change recording material that will lead to the development of a re-writable DVD disk capable of playback on DVD-Video players and computer DVD-ROM devices. TDK, which has its US base in Port Washington, New York, has been demonstrating working prototypes of a 4.7Gb DVD-RW disks using its new ReCom rewritable/compatible recording material. As well as enabling the creation of compatible, re-writable disks, the material can be used to increase the capacity of today’s DVD-RAM disks from 2.6Gb to 4.7Gb. ReCom uses silver, antimony, tellurium and indium to form tiny data marks in response to rapid laser pulses. It has been tested to over 1,000 record/re-write cycles. TDK says it has also created a write-once DVD-R disk with 4.7Gb capacity, up from today’s 3.95Gb. Write-once DVD-R disks (unlike DVD-RAM) are playback compatible with DVD-ROM and DVD-Video drives, and are commonly used by multimedia producers and DVD authoring companies.
