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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rjk01 who wrote (20535)	7/9/2001 11:29:54 AM
From: rjk01	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

what the implication to flash memory? Anyone? packs 2,000 snapshots David Orenstein 04/09/2001 1984: 600MB compact discs spell doom for vinyl LPs. 1997: 4.7GB DVDs improve the quality of home video. 2002: 14GB to 100GB multilevel or multilayer DVDs will improve enterprise backup and personal video recording. 2002: 100GB+ multilayer CDs will make digital cinema distribution a snap. Illustration: James Kaczman It won't look any different. But the dowdy old CD-ROM is poised to become one of the coolest technologies in town. Cheap, recordable CDs will become three times faster and store three times as much by the time Christmas rolls around. A few years from now, consumers may be able to stick a 10GB recordable CD the size of a business card into their cameras- and use it to store as many as 2,000 high-resolution photos. Within five years the oncoming revolution in compact disc technology promises to spin out discs that store as much as 100GB of data, providing storage for digital cinema and backups at enterprise data centers. Traditional CD and DVD drives work by shining a laser onto a pitted disc. At each point on the disc, the surface is either even, so the light bounces back and the drive registers a 0, or the light hits a pit and doesn't bounce back, registering a 1. As the disc spins, the drive can read the pattern of 1s and 0s that make up the data on the disc. The most straightforward way to increase the capacity of CDs and DVDs is to shrink the pits and the wavelength of the laser, but that will be difficult and expensive for years to come, says John Freeman, president of research for Strategic Marketing Decisions. Three times the data There is, however, an interim solution: Calimetrics, of Alameda, Calif., and its partners TDK Electronics, Sanyo, and Mitsubishi Chemical make CDs with marks (similar to pits) of eight different depths or shades of gray. This triples the amount of information per mark because computers understand numbers 0 to 7 as three combinations of 0 and 1. So when the laser strikes a mark "6" deep (in binary language 1-1-0), it sees not just a zero or a one, but three bits of information, and thus three times as much data. Multilevel technology can improve both CDs and DVDs, and the drives that run, write, and read these multilevel discs will be able to read traditional discs (but not the other way around), says Thomas Burke, co-founder and chairman of Calimetrics. By the end of the year, TDK will begin producing the first discs, 2GB recordable CDs for $2, says Bruce Youmans, vice president and executive director of TDK Electronics. (Current recordable CDs hold 650MB.) Constellation 3D's multilayer approach would increase capacity even more by stacking 10 or more disc layers on top of one another, says John Ellis, vice president of marketing. A 30-layer DVD would hold about 100GB. Some DVDs already on the market are two-layer but cannot be multilayered because laser light entering a stack of several layers would bounce out of control and produce interfering "noise." But Constellation's discs use a fluorescent dye that absorbs the laser and emits a different frequency. A filter in the drive lets only the reflected wavelength through to be read, blocking the noise. Although the company's multilayer technology is further from the store shelves than Calimetrics' multilevel approach, Constellation is working to gain entrŽe in the digital cinema, personal video recorder, and enterprise storage markets, Ellis says. The company forged an agreement in January with Taiwan-based Lite-On IT to make drives and expects to begin shipping products at the end of the year. The ultimate goal in optical storage remains a shorter-wavelength blue laser that would allow for smaller and more plentiful pits. But blue lasers remain difficult-and expensive-to produce. Fortunately, you don't have to wait for that breakthrough. High-capacity disks that are capable of meeting the demands of multimedia and business computing are not far away at all. David Orenstein is a senior writer for Business 2.0.