The Globe Online
A radical new way to read data
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 11/20/2000
AS VEGAS - At last week's Comdex computer trade show, leading electronics companies like Japan's Matsushita touted the wonders of their new recordable DVD drives, capable of copying nearly 5 gigabytes of digital data.
Meanwhile, in a darkened conference room across town, a band of emigre Russian scientists were showing off a new optical storage technology that could soon make DVDs seem as primitive as the floppy disk.
Constellation 3D Inc., a New York-based company that's opening a research lab in Boston, uses a radical new way of reading optical data. This method could someday allow a single CD-ROM-size disk to store several lifetimes' worth of information - as much as 1,000 gigabytes per disk.
Except for their size, the new disks look nothing like today's CD-ROMs. They're clear as glass. Unlike traditional CD-ROMs or DVD disks, there's no layer of aluminum to reflect the laser light.
With a regular optical disk, laser light at a precise frequency is shone onto a surface that's marked with billions of tiny pits. These pits reflect the light back to a detector, which reads the reflection and converts it to a stream of digital pulses, which in turn are converted into pictures and sounds.
The Constellation 3D disk uses a layer of plastic treated with a chemical that gives off a fluorescent glow when it's hit by a laser. The wavelength of the glowing light is different from that of the laser. So the detector is tuned to ignore the laser light and look for the glow instead. The glow from billions of pits is used to play back the data.
''Essentially, it's a very old technology,'' said Vladimir Schwartz, Constellation 3D's chief technology officer, who compares it to the way doctors have long diagnosed illnesses by injecting glowing dye into a patient's bloodstream. But this time, the glow is used to identify digital information.
Why do it this way? For one thing, it's far easier to filter out noise and distortion. Just tune your detector to read only the fluorescent glow and ignore all other signals. Besides, now you can laminate multiple layers onto your disk and tune the laser to scan each of them separately, or even several of them at once.
Today's DVD technology can only handle two layers of data. The scientists at Constellation 3D say that they've gotten up to 10 layers in the lab, enough to store nearly 50 gigabytes of data on a single disk. And they see no reason to stop there. Schwartz says they can keep on adding layers until each disk can hold a terabite (1,024 gigabytes) of data.
Constellation 3D has already earned or applied for more than 60 patents. Now the company wants to turn its invention into a practical product. A spokesman says it has signed a letter of intent with Japanese electronics firm Ricoh to make disk players based on the technology, but Ricoh officials couldn't be reached to confirm this. However, Japan's Zeon Chemicals has agreed to work with Constellation 3D. Zeon will make the chemicals needed to produce the disks.
Early versions of the new disks will be able to store 25 gigabytes of data. And though no retail price has been set for the disks or the hardware to run them, Schwartz says the manufacturing cost of each disk should be about 1.7 cents per gigabyte, or 42.5 cents per disk. The low price of the disks will be vital to the system's success. ''If you are inexpensive, you are golden,'' he said.
Better yet, users will be able to record on the disks, using a technology similar to that of today's CD burners. So anybody with one of these devices will have a cheap way to store unlimited amounts of information.
Texas Instruments Inc. is working with Constellation 3D because TI is the leading maker of programmable digital signal processors, the ultrafast chips used to process video and audio signals. TI wants to be the company that provides the chips that will power these futuristic disk players.
Today's DVD disks can store only 4.7 gigabytes of data. That's enough to play back a Hollywood movie with far better sound and picture quality than an analog videotape. But it's not nearly enough to allow for the super-sharp reproduction available with the new high-definition TV sets.
According to Steve Haddad, TI's director of advanced business development, you'd need about 20 gigabytes of storage to display a full-length film in high definition. That's why he's thrilled with the Constellation 3D process. ''This is the first time we've seen anything with the capability of addressing that challenge,'' Haddad says.
Traditionally, optical disk systems like DVDs pump out data far slower than magnetic hard drives. But the Constellation 3D system could change that by enabling a radical new way of reading data from the disk. Remember that the disk doesn't read reflected laser light but the glow of the disk material after a laser has struck it.
Schwartz says it's possible to sweep a band of laser light across one of his disks, and then take an extremely detailed photograph of the glowing dots, using the same kind of technology found in today's digital cameras. Such a photo would enable the optical drive to read the disk at up to a gigabyte per second. This would allow optical disk systems to supplant today's complex and crash-prone magnetic hard drives.
Indeed, the company hopes to use this method in a new kind of portable data storage device: a thin card containing a clear plastic window, a half-inch square. In fact, the window is a Constellation 3D disk capable of containing up to 10 gigabytes of data.
This card would fit inside, say, a palmtop or laptop computer. With a sweep of an internal laser, the device would be able to read the data on the minidisk. Add the ability to rewrite the disk, and such cards could be a cheap substitute for flash memory cards in digital cameras. A single mini-disk could hold thousands of digital images.
''The company is still quite a bit away from a real product,'' said Wolfgang Schlichting, research manager for removable storage at International Data Corp. But Schlichting, an engineer who formerly worked on multilayer optical disk systems, added the basic principles of the Constellation 3D technology are essentially sound. ''I know that it's possible. There's no magic behind it,'' he said.
Constellation 3D is just one of several companies working on ultra-high-capacity optical disks. Among its competitors are Reveo Inc. of Elmsford, N.Y. Chances are, only one will succeed in making its version the global standard.
But in a few years, it's possible that the old-fashioned hard drive could disappear altogether from desktop computers, replaced by removable disks of crystal-clear plastic.
This story ran on page C01 of the Boston Globe on 11/20/2000.
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