Features - Storage Innovations:

OPTWARE RECORDS, PLAYS MOVIE ON HOLOGRAPHIC DISC

Optware Corp, the developer of Collinear Holographic Data Storage System, announced 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 8-12 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.

Technical details will be presented at "COST Action P8 (Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research,)", which will be held in Paris Sept. 16-17.

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 1TB of data (200 times the capacity of a single layer DVD), with a transfer speed of 1GB 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.