Oak completes Xerographics acquisition

Storage company Oak has completed its acquisition of Xerographic Laser Images and at the same time announced a major win with Orion Electronics. Oak specialises in producing semiconductors which will bring DVD devices to the home market, selling its technology to OEMs which use the technology. Today it struck a deal to resell its technology to a major manufacturer of Karaoke and CD video systems in Asia. The decoder chip -- the OTI 226 -- will ramp up in volume next month and will provide support for both VideoCD and DVD. But that poses the question as to which of these standards will be adopted worldwide. Oak has now creatred a consumer group to help resolve these problems, said Paul Vroomen, who heads up the division. It will create silicon for video disk players, cable, satellite and set top boxes. ® Its acquistion of Xerographic Laser Images forms part of its plans to move into the optical storage market. Seagate, in particular, is well advanced on optical storage standards, meaning that competitors like Oak will have to use semiconductors to accomplish the same future task. Oak said that XLI will now operate as a division of Pixel Magic, and will continue to supply silicon and motherboard solutions for image processing systems. XLI has a similar role and has technology that will give better resolution from printers, digital copiers, scanners, fax systems and other peripherals. Pixel Magic has a number of customers including Fujitsu, Sharp, Toshiba, Kodak and Ricoh.