Simulation of Radial Tracking Error Signals on Optical Disk Drives

Optical disk drives require a radial tracking error signal to control a radial actuator. This actuator is used to follow track runout introduced by respindling the media platter and nonrepeatable spindle runout. The error signal can be optically derived by a variety of methods.1 This paper represents a method of simulating the radial error signal resulting from several different optical tracking methods as an aid to design evaluation and tolerance analysis.