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19 Feb 2004
A new data storage material that is sensitive to blue light could accelerate the development of holographic disk drives.
Inphase Technologies, a spin-out from Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, US, claims to have developed the world's first holographic storage material that uses blue laser light to store data. The media called "Tapestry HDS5000" will be used in the Colorado-based firm's first generation of 200 GB holographic drives which are due to hit the market by 2006.
The disc material, which is photosensitive to blue light between 400 and 410 nm, is also being offered to other drive developers as a 120 or 130 mm diameter discs or 3x3 / 2x3 inch slides.
Holographic drives store electronic data by converting it into a 2D checkerboard pattern of light or dark pixels. This pattern is then written as a hologram into a disc made of a photosensitive material. Storing a series of these holograms at different depths within the disc gives a potentially enormous storage capacity.
For example, a single 200GB blue disc will be able to hold 98 million printed pages, 200,000 1MB photos or 1540 hours of high quality music. In contrast, the next generation "BluRay" DVD disks currently being developed by Sony and others will hold between 20 and 27GB.
According to Liz Murphy, director of marketing at InPhase, the firm has a roadmap to develop 130 mm diameter discs that store up to 1.6Tb of data by 2010. She also says the technology will be cost effective. "We aim to reach 25 cents per Gigabyte, that's just $50 for a 200Gb disc."
Author
Oliver Graydon is editor of Optics.org and Opto & Laser Europe magazine.
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