Tear Down: HD DVD player pushes the performance envelope

As an Electrical Engineer, I have a hard time not ripping apart any new gadgets that I come across to see how they were designed. Today, I ran across an article in one of my trade magazines that was a good read. It is clear at this stage of the HD DVD game that all of the logic / DSP work must be done discretely as no single chip ASIC's exist. This give us the opportunity to see how all the various function blocks fit together that would normally all be hidden inside one huge chip. Of course, this also means that players cost more to manufacture. Anyhow, read on for a complete tear down of a Toshiba HD-1A HD DVD player.