Lucent spin-off claims holographic storage breakthrough
Peter Clarke
01/04/2005 8:59 AM EST
URL: siliconstrategies.com
LONGMONT, Colorado — InPhase Technologies has developed several prototypes of a holographic storage drive, the company said Tuesday (Jan. 4) claiming the event moved holographic storage from research to commercialization.
The company was founded in December 2000 as a Lucent Technologies venture, spun out of Bell Labs research, with the objective of becoming the first company to bring holographic data storage technology to market.
The completion of the prototype was enabled by the development of recording techniques and holographic media. The prototype is set to be the foundation of a family of holographic drives, with single-disk data capacities that range from 200-Gbytes to 1.6-Terabytes, InPhase said.
"This technology offers the highest density and performance of any optical system and will assume a prominent role in the storage landscape," said Nelson Diaz, president and chief executive officer of InPhase, in a statement.
The prototype drive records data into InPhase's patented two-chemistry photopolymer WORM (write once, read many) material. The recording material is 1.5-milliimeter thick and sandwiched between two 130-mm diameter transmissive plastic disk substrates.
Hitachi Maxell Ltd., an investor and development partner of InPhase, designed and developed a cartridge that provides protection for the light-sensitive recording material, while allowing integration within automated libraries.
The prototype arranges more than one million bits of data into a "page", which is recorded with a single flash of a 407-nm wavelength laser beam. Multiple "pages" of data, referred to as a "book", are recorded in one spot on the disk providing approximately 12-Mbytes of data in a single book location.
The prototype drive includes all drive subsystems such as the auto load/unload mechanics, servo system, holographic read/write head, data channel and electronics. The media cartridge is loaded and unloaded automatically using a mechanism designed and developed for InPhase by Alps Electric Co. Ltd., an InPhase investor and development partner.
The servo system, designed and developed by InPhase, regulates both radial and rotational movement of the media and the angle of the reference beam. During a read operation, feedback from the hologram provides information to the servo system to optimize the recovery of the data with the best signal to noise ratio.
Displaytech Inc., a developer of ferroelectric liquid crystal on silicon (FLCOS) microdisplays, and InPhase have formed a joint venture funded by a grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Advanced Technology Program (ATP) for the development of a spatial light modulator that will be used in the InPhase product family ranging up to 1.6-Tbytes on a single 130-mm diameter holographic disk. |
