Re: Quinta
1) Per Greg's report, Quinta's first products won't hit the market until late 1999. SEG's initial investments (~$10 million) in Quinta were placed in April and May, not coincidentally, just after Terastor debuted its competing hybrid magneto-optical product. SEG subsequently bought the entire outfit in July for $285 million plus about $95 million in milestone payments.
2) A few months ago, NIST awarded Quinta one of its 1997 ATP Awards for Data Storage. This government research grants suggests strongly that OAW is not ready for prime-time yet.
Demonstrate an optical hard drive that stores up to 350 gigabytes at a very competitive data rate, potentially reducing the cost per gigabyte of on-line data storage to a level that will significantly improve U.S. market share.
Sponsor: Quinta Corporation
1870 Lundy Ave.
San Jose, CA 95131-1826
Joint Venture Partners:
SDL, Inc. (San Jose, CA)
Project duration: 3 years
Total project (est.): $6,510 K
Requested ATP funds: $3,080 K 2)
.....To make possible optical alternatives to fixed magnetic media such as multigigabyte magnetic disk drives, Quinta Corp. and SDL Inc. (San Jose, CA) jointly propose to develop high-capacity, multiple-platter magneto-optical storage drives with flying optical heads to access each recording surface. Quinta will develop the technology base for low-cost, easily manufactured flying optical heads for use with advanced laser light sources to be developed by SDL. The new drives will deliver light to the optical heads through a unique, proprietary light delivery system. The simplified heads will contain a micromachined fine actuator and an optical element based on
conventional optics. Specifically, the joint venture has as its initial challenging goal the development of the technology base for
100 gigabyte magneto-optic drives that would employ an advanced red diode laser. A second challenging goal will be development of prototype flying optical heads for use with advanced blue diode lasers in large capacity drives. The risk in this project is to demonstrate the feasibility of systems with a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio acceptable for read/write capabilities. Successful development of this technology would allow U.S. firms to increase dramatically their $6 billion share of the $60 billion worldwide optoelectronics market (expected 1998 value).
atp.nist.gov
3) If Seagate is taking that long to bring OAW to market then it is reasonable to assume that they are probably going to leapfrog the red-green lasers more commonly used in optical devices and go straight to variations of the blue laser diodes. Several months ago, Nichia of Japan announced that it had reached the important 10,000 milestone necessary before they can start to mass-manufacture (now expected to reach the mainstream in the 1999/2000 time frame). The blue laser has a shorter wavelenght and is expected to boost optical storage density by anywhere from 2 to 6 times that of red and green lasers. This development impacts DVDs, CDs, Terastor's NFR and Quinta's OAW. |
