Anatomy of the Playstation 3

The Blu-Ray Drive

The Blu-Ray drive that comes with Playstation 3 can read BD (Blu-Ray) discs at 2x (72 Mbps, i.e., 9 MB/s), DVDs at 8x (8.1 MB/s) and CDs at 24x (3,600 KB/s). As you can see this is a very simple unit (all Blu-Ray players have a minimum speed of 2x, so 2x here isn’t really an advantage).

Figure 17: Playstation 3 Blu-Ray drive.

Figure 18: Playstation 3 Blu-Ray drive.

Figure 19: Chips used on the Blu-Ray drive.

The chips used on the Blu-Ray drive that comes with the Playstation 3 are the following:

• Main controller (DSP, Digital Signal Processor): Sony CXD5065
• Secondary controller (FEP, Front End Processor): Sony CXA2720
• Motor driver (1): Rohm BA5888FP, used to drive the motors.
• Motor driver (2): Rohm BD7956FS, used to drive the motors.
• Flash ROM: Spansion S29AL008D (8 Mbit, 1 MB), used to store the drive’s firmware.
• RAM (buffer): ESMT M12L64164A-7TG (64 Mbit, 8 MB), so this unit has an 8 MB buffer.