NEC has developed a technology for 8x Blu-ray burners, a Japanese site reports. Current NEC drives can only burn Blu-ray at 5x, and many other commercially-available models are slower still, or complete lacking in Blu-ray burning. Samples of the 8x chipset are going out to manufacturers; the technology is said to merge a digital signal processor (DSP) with an analog one, the latter originally intended to serve in 20x DVD drives.

By combining circuits normally housed separately, the new system-on-chip is said to be 20 percent smaller, and consume only 1.8W of power, a 33 percent reduction. NEC has additionally produced a cheaper version without Blu-ray recording. No end-product release dates have been mentioned, but NEC is said to already be working on a "next-generation" technology which could write at speeds between 12 and 16x.