Funai Electric Assigned Patent

Funai Electric Co., Ltd., Osaka, Japan, has been assigned a patent (8,953,429) developed by Fujita, Shinji, Daito, Japan, for a “optical disc device.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”An optical disc device includes an optical pickup unit including a semiconductor laser that shines a laser light, a light-receiving unit that receives the return light of the laser light, a high-frequency generating circuit that generates high-frequency signals, a pickup driver that generates a drive signal that drives the semiconductor laser based on the high-frequency signal, a control unit that controls the high-frequency generating circuit such that, in states in which playback of the optical disc is halted while irradiation with the laser light is being performed, the signal level of the high-frequency signal to be superimposed is set at a first signal level other than zero so as to be smaller than in states in which the playback is performed.“

The patent application was filed on March 19, 2014 (14/219,278).