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Technology Stocks : EMC How high can it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Carragher who wrote (5987)	4/25/1999 3:11:00 PM
From: SJS	Respond to of 17183

EMC-Killer?.......Don't worry, it won't be for a while....... _______________________ Stuffing 30 Terabytes Into Dice Lab Watch April 23, 1999 by Robert Buderi Computer gurus love to muse about ubiquitous computing--seamlessly linking the physical and digital worlds so that everything and everybody is woven into one big web. The inhabitants of this future world would spend their lives accumulating digital information. One wild idea even has folks outfitted with wearable cameras equipped with computers that would record whatever they encounter. Says one researcher, "You won't forget anything--certainly nothing you've ever heard, seen or read." But where will all this data be stored? Ask Richard Linke of the NEC Research Institute Inc., part of NEC Corp. of Princeton, N.J., and he'll turn on an argon laser. Its green light bounces off mirrors and splits into two beams that meet perpendicularly in what just might be the answer: a crystal cube smaller than a die. With the right tweaking, the cube exhibits properties that might herald a revolutionary storage medium--one that preserves the "on" and "off" signals of digital bits as aspects of light. In other words, holograms. Theoretically, one die-size cube could store 30 terabytes--a library's worth of data. "I see it as a replacement for hard disk drives, but with maybe 1,000 times more capacity," Linke notes. "I think people are going to want that kind of storage in every PC." The key to this crystal cube storage is an unusual trait associated with certain dopant atoms that are used to enhance semiconductor electrical properties. When manipulated with a laser beam, a tiny area around each atom switches from a highly refractive state to a lower refractive index. Stuffing 30 Terabytes Into Dice page 2: Formidable Obstacles To Linke, these two optical states sounded like a storage medium. After all, disk drives rely on two magnetic states to represent the ones or zeros of binary data. Under his scheme, laser light is split into two paths: the signal beam ferrying in data and the reference beam that "writes" information into the crystal. Before entering the cube, the signal passes through a glass mask similar to the ones used for photolithographic etching of integrated circuits. The mask is laced with metal, which blocks the beam in some places but allows it to pass unencumbered through areas of glass. The resulting combination of light and dark represents the zeros and ones of the data to be stored. The data then rides the signal beam into the crystal. From there, the process is classic holography. Inside the semiconductor, the interference between the beams forms a pattern of bright and dark regions throughout the crystal, not just on its surface (hence the term hologram). Since the refractive index is lowered only in regions struck by light--and stays low after the signal is turned off--what remains is a recording of the mask data. Moreover, if the reference beam re-enters the crystal at the same wavelength, angle and polarization, it re-creates the signal beam, allowing stored data to be "read." In theory, a fresh page can be written by rotating either the crystal or beam just a smidge--a mere 50 arc-seconds. So far, Linke and colleague Ian Redmond have stored 11 million bits--about 1.4MB--in a single hologram. By year's end, they hope to implant hundreds of these "pages" onto one crystal. "We would consider [that] a real success, because nobody has come anywhere near that," Linke notes. Formidable obstacles remain. One is that refractive changes only last about 10 seconds at room temperature. Another is that there's no way to selectively erase data: Everything must go in order to eliminate even one bit. Undeterred, Linke and NEC researcher Warren Smith have patented a "dynamic refresh" technology designed to read out and rewrite data every few seconds. It won't be reliable enough for archival storage, but it might do for security camera footage, for instance. Moreover, Linke notes, a refresh scheme solves the data-erasing problem because users can choose to rewrite only the portions they want. After all, there are always a few things we'd like to forget.