Holographic Versatile Disk

Holographic storage: 500GB

2006-01-08T11:51:00.000-08:00

In holographic storage, a laser beam is split by a mirror. One of the split beams has data encoded into it. The two beams are then recombined in a medium that records their interference pattern. This pattern can be read back and decoded into the original data. Since data is literally encoded in beams of light and in three dimensions, data densities are incredibly high.

The first products will be commercial archival storage cartridges that will hold 300GB. By 2008, capacity should be at 800GB.

InPhase is hoping that its first consumer product will be a postage stamp-size card that holds from 4GB to 8GB (no customers for this product have been announced yet). After that, a business card-size piece of film could be produced that holds 500GB.

These card-based holographic storage units should be cheap to produce and operate under low power, since they don't have to spin the media like a magnetic or optical disk does (they use tiny mirrors, instead, to modulate the laser). The drives use standard CD-class lasers, too, which are available in abundance.

InPhase to ship 300GB holographic drive

2006-01-06T06:44:00.000-08:00

InPhase has announced that its Tapestry drives will be available this year, using media developed in partnership with Hitachi Maxell. According to the company, the 130 mm discs will have a transfer rate of 20 megabytes per second, making them usable for media applications. Now if only we didn't have to wait another three years for InPhase's promised terabyte discs.

Holographic Disk Storage: 300GB to start, 1.6TB by 2010

2005-12-09T08:41:00.000-08:00

Holographic Versatile Disk technology is scheduled to scale to 1.6TB by 2010. This will allow up to 142 hours of HD content to be stored on one disk; the equivalent of backing up a server on one disk not much larger than a floppy or zip disk.

Maxell Holographic Storage 300GB by September 2006

2005-12-08T21:44:00.000-08:00

Information storage media company Maxell has said it will launch its first holographic storage products in September 2006. The first drive will have a capacity of 300GB and a throughput of 160Mbps.

Holographic storage works by storing information using light-sensitive crystals. Because it uses the whole volume of the disk, not just the surface, it's possible to store much more information than is possible on a DVD. For example, an HVD can store approximately half a million 300-page books on a single disc.

With a single holographic disk able to store 1.6 million high-resolution colour photos or over 240 hours of TV broadcast, holographic storage is starting to draw the attention of many in the IT industry.

How It All Started : Holographic Versatile Disk

2005-12-08T12:00:00.000-08:00

YOKOHAMA, Japan, August 23, 2004

Optware Corp., the developer of Collinear Holographic* Data Storage System, announced today that it had achieved successfully world's first recording and play back of digital movies on a holographic recording disc with a reflective layer using Optware's revolutionary Collinear Holography. This is a major milestone for commercializing holographic data storage system.
The recorded movies were played back in a series of meetings from July eight through 12 with Optware's six existing investors as well as eight enterprises both domestic and overseas including leading manufacturers of electronic and electric products for consumer, business and industrial use. Company names are not disclosed.

Recording holographic page data** on a rotating transparent disc has been reported before. Such discs, however, are foreign to the conventional optical discs. Lacking the servo information, they do not seem to have a commercial viability.
On the contrary Optware has proposed Collinear Holographic recording on a hologram disc the structure of which follows conventional optical disc, i.e. preformatted disc with a reflective layer (disc with servo information).
This type of disc has been said to be inadequate because preformatted address pits generate diffusion noise during read / write, thus deteriorate the signal quality.
Optware has overcome this problem by applying a dichroic mirror layer between the recording and reflective layers. This dichroic mirror layer blocks the diffusion by the address pits, allowing ideal collinear holographic recording.

Optware's demonstration is an epoch-making event in a sense that it proved the successful integration of optical disc technology and holographic recording technology

Optware's holographic recording technology

Holographic recording technology records data on discs in the form of laser interference fringes, enabling existing discs the same size as today's DVDs to store as much as one terabyte of data (200 times the capacity of a single layer DVD), with a transfer speed of one gigabyte per second (40 times the speed of DVD). This approach is rapidly gaining attention as a high-capacity, high-speed data storage technology for the age of broadband.

Optware Corp. was established in 1999 as a development venture to find ways of incorporating holographic recording technology, seen as the heart of the high-capacity optical discs of the future, in commercially viable products. The Company's arsenal of valuable patents includes collinear holography, a technique that enables great simplification of optical systems.

* The collinear holography technique
Optware's exclusive development of the collinear holography technique is part of its effort to make holographic recording technology practical. A patented technology originally proposed by Optware founder and chief evangelist Hideyoshi Horimai, collinear holography combines a reference laser and signal laser on a single beam, creating a three-dimensional hologram composed of data fringes. This image is illuminated on the medium using a single objective. Using this breakthrough mechanism, Optware dramatically simplified and downsized the previously bulky and complicated systems required to generate holograms. Further enhancements were achieved with Optware's exclusive servo system. The introduction of this mechanism enabled reduced pickup size, elimination of vibration isolators, high-level compatibility with DVD and CD discs and low-cost operation, effectively obliterating the remaining obstacles to full commercialization.

** Page data
Two dimensional bit map image to be recorded and played back by hologram. Data to be written is first encoded to a series of page data, then recoded holographically

Next Generation Storage : Holographic

2005-12-07T20:26:00.000-08:00

US-based InPhase Technologies and Hitachi Maxell Ltd. are working on a technology called Tapestry Holographic Memory that uses laser beams to save 300GB of information onto a single disc.
According to InPhase, holographic technology allows millions of bits of data to be written and read in parallel with one flash of light. The firm claims this method of access makes performance better than that of current optical storage devices.
Though the technology will first be adopted by the broadcasting industry, Holographic technology should find its way into homes thereafter.
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