Potential blue laser application. I came across this article that was cross linked from a site www.slashdot.org (great tech/news site, geared for the computer nerd in all of us).
I just read an interesting article about new cd storage technology that uses 10 storage layers. 8 more then a cd and 6 more then a dvd. Can blue laser help to improve this technology if it hits the market? I have enclosed a link to the article and the article as well. It does have some cool pictures.
3dhardware.net
I'm pretty sure that if blue lasers can be incorporated into this they should be able to hit the 1.4 terabyte they are talking about.
<Article as seen on 3dhardware.net>
The FMD-ROM disc planned for release has 10 (!) layers, compared to a maximum of 2 for a CD, and maximum of 4 for a DVD. What?s even scarier about the disc, which is of the same size as a CD or DVD, is that it can store up to a massive 140GB!
by Adam Duracz
(12/2/2000)
Well isn?t this typical, the DVD format is just starting to root itself on the market, and something just totally better comes along. The good ole? CD-ROM standard stores around 650 (a little bit more in some cases) megabytes on a disc. This is enough for most purposes, such as music, programs or demonstrations, but when you start dealing with high-quality
multimedia, such as very high-definition audio, high resolution video or really large games, the CD-ROM is a rather cramping medium. The DVD is better. Storing up to 17GB per disc (double layered, double sided DVD?s), this medium is more than enough to store a full-length flick, stored in MPEG-2, with several separate audio tracks for different languages, commentaries etc.
So why look for something that could store more? The answer is obvious. We?re never satisfied with what we?ve got. The next generation of movie discs will probably store video in much higher resolutions than the ones we use today. Maybe the video will be uncompressed, and we will positively have audio tracks with 8/9-point surround, instead of 4/5-point, like we have today. With what I?ve mentioned, we?re already looking at over 40GB of data, which would require the use of more than one DVD per disc, a larger DVD disc format (sized like a LaserDisc) or simply another solution.
Enter the FMD-ROM. The FMD-ROM disc planned for release has 10 (!) layers, compared to a maximum of 2 for a CD, and maximum of 4 for a DVD. What?s even scarier about the disc, which is of the same size as a CD or DVD, is that it can store up to a massive 140GB! That?s more than 7 times what a DVD can store, and without having to turn the disc! With 140 GB of storage capacity, you could fit over 20 hours of HDTV (MPEG-2 compressed) video, a small library or the contents of your entire CD collection, uncompressed, on a single 120mm disc!
<Page 2>
Now some about how it really works. CD-ROM?s and DVD-ROM?s store data in a way that is embarrassingly similar to Thomas Edison?s old gramophone records. Instead of using a needle,
though, they use a laser that is emitted onto a surface which is covered with pits or dots that put the laser wave out of phase with the emitted beam. An in-phase beam means a ?0?, while an in-phase beam means ?1?. While this is a perfectly functional solution for a two-dimensional surface, like the surface of a CD or DVD disc, problems start occurring when you try to project the laser through several layers. Beams tend to go out of phase, and so what should have been a ?1? becomes a ?0?, which makes the information pretty useless. When developing the FMD, Constellation 3D, the company that created the standard, decided to rethink the whole matter. Instead of using pits or dots to store information, they used the fact that a special kind of plastic becomes fluorescent (emits photons / electromagnetic waves) when energized by a laser.
C3D also abandoned the concept of in-phase laser beams to read information. Instead, the light from the fluorescent ?pits? can be of a completely different frequency than the
laser, which eliminates interference, and therefore also makes the use of multiple layers possible.
Because of the multi-layered fashion of the FMD disks, another interesting feature knocks on the door: fast transfer speeds. According to C3D, FMD disk readers could
reach transfer speeds of up to (OMG!) 1GB per second. Please, read that again, because that?s more than 20 times faster than any hard drive around today, and 100 times faster than any DVD-ROM drive on the market. |
