Drive Electronics from Blu-Ray

I just took the diode out of a LG 6x Blu-Ray burner and would now like to dive into the electronics. Given that the data rate of a 6x Blu-Ray is 216Mbits/s the pulses are only 4.6ns long inside this thing. That's pretty impressive! I would like to see if I could turn the remaining components into a 200MHz square wave laser driver/constant current source. Does anyone here have any experience with this? Maybe give me an idea where to start and how difficult it is going to be.

Thanks
Tim

you can start by looking carefully at the controller chip that the leads from the BR diode go to. Find any markings and search for a data sheet. This may be very hard to find. The chip will be controlled by a microcontroller iwth a serial link most likely, so brush up on your programming and get out the soldering gun!

why do you need to drive it with 200MHz square pulses anyway? while the pulsed power uner such conditions will be higher, the average, determined by the duty cycle will not. besides, designing and physically building such a high speed driver is a rather challenging task. you cant just implement the dead bug type of component assembly unless you want monstrously lethal ringing on the edges of the pulses that will surely kill the golden diode. there are special lay-out approaches in designing high frequency circuits /microstrip lines, grounding considerations, current return paths..../. i have some experience in this realm and i can assure you that it is a totally different thig compared to the DDL driver world of electronics.
Anyway, all burner drives have high speed current sources usually found directly on the pick-up module. Have a look at the chip size and pc layout + all smd components and see for urself if this can be a home-brew undertaking also look into atmel's website. they make LD high speed drivers

I mostly just want to do it for fun. I just want to see if I can access the electronics and switch the diode with the same speed as it is designed to do in a burner.

I haven't been able to identifiy the components I suspect to be the driver. I can't find any datasheets based on the ID's on the chip. One has a symbol which looks like an "i" on top of a boat or something. I drew a little sketch in MS paint. Anyone recognize it? Looks like the part number starts with CRZ.

Thanks
Tim

Intersil....  :

ISL58767CRZ-T13

EDIT: Nice picture, btw. At first i thought it is a snail