Intersil Corporation today announced that its Elantec Product Group had reached a major milestone with the shipment of over 100 million laser drivers. Intersil continues its leadership position in innovation and distribution to the world's optical storage original equipment manufacturers. "Our optical storage products have set the worldwide industry standard for laser driver IC's in the optical disc drive market," said Mohan Maheswaran, vice president and general manager of Intersil's Elantec Product Group. "We developed the world's first integrated laser driver IC in 1997, a technology that dramatically influenced the rapid growth of the CD recorder drive industry and enabled faster recording CD-R and CD-RW `X' speeds and smaller form factor disc drives."

Being first with an innovative solution, Intersil established the industry standard interface for all Optical Pickup Unit (OPU) electronics used in CD-R/RW disc drives. Through continued innovation, five generations of laser driver IC families have been developed that enabled ever-increasing Write performance for CD-R/RW and DVD dual-Write drives. In 1999, Elantec introduced the world's first Write Strategy Laser Driver for the emerging DVD/CD dual-Write disc drive market. To date, over 100 million laser drivers have been shipped to every major optical storage original equipment manufacture in the world.

"Our industry leadership stems from being first to implement emerging standards and from developing strategic alliances with key technology leaders," said Stephen P. Sacarisen, director of marketing for Intersil's Elantec Optical Products.

"Our strategy had been one of rapid product validation with customers and continued execution of products-to-market that enable our customers to introduce more competitive products in the fast moving PC arena. We will continue to lead the market with innovative new architectures that offer the highest-performance and lowest-cost system-level solutions," added Maheswaran.