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To: DiViT who wrote (27529)	1/5/1998 1:27:00 PM
From: BillyG	Respond to of 50808

Blue laser, more storage............ sumnet.com Blue Lasers Pierce Storage Ceiling By Carolyn Whelan Palo Alto, Calif.--"One giant step towards 100-gigabyte storage." So says Waguin Ishak, director of communications and optic research at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, about HP's demonstration of a blue laser, a rapidly developing technology that will revolutionize computer storage. HP's lasing in October follows a string of demonstrations by Nichia Chemical Industries of Japan, semiconductor developer Cree Research, University of California at Santa Barbara researchers, Sony and Xerox. Though research and development of blue lasers was forecast to move at a snail's pace, significant breakthroughs over the past two years have set the scene for rapid development. Last year, Cree made several demonstrations of blue laser technology. And two weeks prior to HP's demonstration, on Oct. 14, Xerox announced that it had generated a blue diode laser beam. HP Labs Japan successfully demonstrated a room-temperature, pulsed-operation blue-laser diode with a wavelength of 413 nanometers on Oct. 26. And the day after HP's lasing, Shuji Nakamura of Nichia said he had created blue lasers with a lifetime of 10,000 hours, making the technology ripe for commercialization. Blue-light lasers from American companies only pulse off and on quickly for short periods of time. The laser that HP demonstrated is built on layers of gallium nitride grown on a sapphire substrate. The differential external quantum efficiency of the laser is 8 percent, with a peak output power of more than 80 milliwatts. Shorter Wavelengths Blue lasers are more powerful than lasers using infrared (780-850 nanometers) or red (650-670nm) because they operate at a shorter wavelength (410-460nm). The best known use today of infrared and red light lasers is for compact discs. Because blue lasers can write and read high densities, they enable even higher-density, multi-gigabyte storage devices. Potential storage applications of blue lasers include anything on compact disc. The shorter wavelength of blue lasers means that they can potentially increase the capacity of information stored tenfold, and focus to a smaller spot size (2,000 dots per inch and higher). A digital video disc could use that capacity to store more bits in the same amount of space, or a laser printer for printing more dots per inch for higher resolution with vastly improved printing quality. Sony sees potential for blue lasers in high-capacity optical disks. The company's current prototype disc uses red and blue-green lasers. With a changed laser, the capacity increases four to five times. Today's single-sided optical disks using red lasers can store up to 8 gigabytes, which increase to 12 gigabytes with blue-green lasers. That capacity would grow to 18 gigabytes with blue lasers. Sony forecasts availability of blue-laser optical discs availability by the year 2000. Others Uses Seen Other future applications of lasers that emit blue light include computer displays, industrial sensors, video discs and covert communications systems. Ultimately, when perfected and combined with green and red lasers, high-powered blue lasers will be used for future lighting applications like traffic, street and indoor lighting that consumes much less power. Mr. Ishak forecasts that products harnessed by blue lasers will be brought to market in less than two years, a prospect which has storage companies watching development closely. Though no commercial blue diode lasers currently exist, market research firm Strategies Unlimited expects the market for components of blue diode lasers to be $2 billion in the next decade.