Welcome Guest ( Log In | Register )


 
Reply to this topicStart new topic
> Holographic Memory, 300GB on a 13cm disc
NickTheGreek
post 9 Sep 2005, 04:42 PM
Post #1


Administrator
Group Icon

Group: Admin
Posts: 110750
Joined: 3-June 05
From: Athens, Greece
Member No.: 1
Zodiac Sign: I'm a leo!
Gender: I'm a m!



QUOTE
www.technologyreview.com,Gregory T. Huang

Although the offices of IBM and Hewlett-Packard are nearby,
Longmont, CO, is decidedly not Silicon Valley chic. But in this Denver
suburb, a radical experiment in data storage is under way.
At the headquarters of InPhase Technologies, where the conference
rooms are named after ski resorts, chief executive Nelson Diaz holds up
a clear plastic disc, about the size of a DVD but thicker, and pops it
into a disc drive. A laptop connected to the drive downloads streaming
video of an old episode of Seinfeld as the drive writes it to the
disc.


But this is no ordinary recording process. The disc has more
than 60 times the storage capacity of a standard DVD, while the drive
writes about 10 times faster than a conventional DVD burner. That means
the disc can store up to 128 hours of video content--almost twice
enough for the full nine seasons of Seinfeld--and records it all in
less than three hours.


It's likely to be one of the first commercial systems to use
"holographic storage," in which bits are encoded in a light-sensitive
material as the three-dimensional interference pattern of lasers.
Unlike CDs and DVDs, which store data bit by bit on their surfaces,
holographic discs store data a page at a time in three dimensions,
enabling huge leaps in capacity and access speed. And InPhase, a
70-person startup spun out of Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in Murray
Hill, NJ, is leading a handful of companies racing to commercialize
this optical storage breakthrough.


Three-dimensional memory could dramatically change how we use
microelectronics. Many of the remarkable advances in consumer
electronics over the last few years--and much of the economic health of
the industry--are directly traceable to the explosion in storage
capacity. Web e-mail services routinely offer each of their customers a
gigabyte of memory for free. Apple's newest iPod is only possible
because of small, cheap hard drives that can hold a staggering 60
gigabytes of data--a storage capacity that just five years ago would
have been a lot for a desktop PC.


Likewise, cell phones now come with flash memory chips easily able
to store address books, calendars, photos, and the like. Meanwhile, CDs
and DVDs have already transformed how people listen to music and watch
movies. But each of these storage technologies has drawbacks. The
density of magnetic materials in hard drives is fast approaching a
fundamental physical limit. Flash memory is slow, and a DVD is barely
large enough to hold a full-length movie.


Storing data in three dimensions would overcome many of these
limitations. Indeed, the theoretical promise of holographic storage has
been talked about for 40 years. But advances in smaller and cheaper
lasers, digital cameras, projector technologies, and optical recording
materials have finally pushed the technology to the verge of the
market. And the ability to cram exponentially more bits into
infinitesimal spaces could open up a whole new realm of applications.


By storing and reading out millions of bits at a time, a
holographic disc could hold a whole library of films. Movies, video
games, and location-based services like interactive maps could be put
on postage-stamp-size chips and carried around on cell phones. A
person's entire medical history, including diagnostic images like
x-rays, could fit on an ID card and be quickly transmitted to or
retrieved from a database.


Eventually, if the hardware becomes affordable for consumers,
holographic storage could supplant DVDs and become the dominant medium
for games and movies. Portable movie players and phones that download
multimedia from the Web would take off. Holographic storage could even
compete with the magnetic hard drive as the computer's fundamental
storage unit. And on a larger scale, corporate and government data
centers could replace their huge, raucous storerooms of server racks
and magnetic-tape reels with the quiet hum of holographic disc drives.


InPhase's competitive edge lies in its partnerships with Hitachi
Maxell, a leading producer of computer tapes and CD-ROMs, and--as of
this May--Bayer MaterialScience, one of the world's largest makers of
plastics used in optical discs. These large corporations see
holographic techniques as the next step in the evolution of storage.
"Our collaboration with InPhase gives us a tremendous opportunity,"
says Hermann Bach, head of technologies for the Americas at Bayer
MaterialScience.


But if and when holographic storage will come to dominate the
market is still an open question. InPhase's initial product launch is
slated for late 2006, but industry experts, while optimistic, are also
cautious. "They have made numerous contributions on the hardware side,
in media and materials, and in error correction," says Hans Coufal,
manager of science and technology strategy at IBM's Almaden Research
Center in San Jose, CA, and an expert on holographic storage. "It's
very impressive but still some ways away from a viable product. Not a
long ways, but some ways."




Lunchroom Lasers




The idea of holographic storage dates back to the work of Polaroid
researcher Pieter J. van Heerden in the early 1960s (and, some contend,
to Nobel laureate Dennis Gabor's original theory of holography in
1948). But the technology had never been practical, requiring
exceedingly expensive materials and bulky laser setups--unlike the
streamlined system from InPhase.

Even Bill Wilson, InPhase's chief scientist, was originally
skeptical. In 1987, as a fresh PhD in physical chemistry from Stanford
University, Wilson joined Bell Labs, turning down a job at IBM, where
he would have started working on holographic storage. "I thought the
field would be a complete waste of time," he admits.


The turnaround began in the early 1990s, when IBM and other
big players started to worry about the limitations of magnetic storage.
As storage capacity increases, the magnetic grains that store data on a
hard drive get packed closer together. Eventually, each grain's
magnetic field will begin to interfere with those of its neighbors,
hindering their ability to reliably hold data. Engineers have thought
of clever ways to defer this problem, but ultimately, grains in
magnetic materials will be too dense to work properly.


Wilson recalls jumping into a friendly argument in the Bell Labs
lunchroom about what new technology could eventually take the place of
magnetic media--and the relative merits of holographic storage. At the
time, the technique was undergoing something of a revival, being
investigated by research groups at IBM, Polaroid, Caltech, and
Stanford. Wilson and Kevin Curtis, an electrical engineer from Caltech
who had recently joined Bell Labs, argued that holographic storage
might actually become viable with suitably small and cheap optical
components. In discussing the technical issues with their colleagues,
they realized the key to making it viable was the material that stored
the data.


In holographic storage, a "data beam" holding information is
crossed with a "reference beam" to produce an interference pattern
that's recorded in a light-sensitive material. To retrieve data from a
particular spot, a reference beam is shone onto it, and the combination
of the reference beam and the patterned material reconstructs the
original data beam, which is read by a digital-camera detector that
translates the beam into a series of electrical signals. The recording
material is typically either an inorganic crystal or a polymer.
Polymers are more sensitive and require less powerful lasers, but they
have their own flaws. For instance, when you hit a photosensitive
polymer with a laser, it tends to deform, which messes up the data.


In 1994, a materials team at Bell Labs led by chemist Lisa Dhar
worked with Wilson and Curtis to produce a "two-chemistry"
photosensitive polymer. The researchers mixed one scaffoldlike polymer,
which stayed rigid and preserved its structure, with another polymer
that reacted to light and stored data. Decoupling the recording
material's optical and structural properties let the researchers
fine-tune each independently, arriving at a combination of sensitivity
and stability that had eluded previous efforts.


Over the next four years, the Bell Labs team got its holographic
material to work in conjunction with the latest miniaturized lasers,
cameras, and optical components to read and write data. This also
required advances in software to correct for errors in storing and
retrieving digital bits. In 1998, as a proof of concept, they built a
prototype holographic recorder and recorded MP3 digital audio in real
time. It was a bulky contraption and not particularly efficient. But at
that point, says Wilson, "we realized we could build the darn thing."


So in mid-2000, the researchers contacted Nelson Diaz about
starting up a company. Diaz had made his name in the storage industry,
working as an engineer for nearly 20 years at Digital Equipment
Corporation and most recently as a general manager at StorageTek in
Louisville, CO, a leading maker of disk and tape drives. When first
told of the researchers' focus on holographic storage, he was
skeptical: he had heard the hype for years. But the closer he looked at
the Bell Labs design, the more he believed. Five months later, he
signed on as chief executive of InPhase.


The first order of business, says Diaz, was getting rights to the
underlying intellectual property. InPhase negotiated a deal with Bell
Labs that gave it ownership of the core patents for the holographic
storage system. Then, of course, the company needed funding. In late
2000, before the tech bubble collapsed, InPhase raised $15 million in
three weeks "without a business plan," says Diaz. (Storage giant
Imation was a first-round investor.) So in December 2000, six
researchers from Bell Labs, including Wilson, Curtis, and Dhar, moved
out of the suburbs of New Jersey and joined their new CEO in
Colorado.




Mainstream Media?




Four and a half years later, the company is still working to develop a
holographic storage product, explains Demetrios Lignos, InPhase's vice
president of engineering.

Lignos is another veteran of the storage industry, a bottom-line
guy, not one to be impressed by fancy science or research demos.
Product development, he says, takes time; in this case, the challenge
was shrinking the optical components down while maintaining the insane
levels of precision needed to make holographic storage reliable. Now
his team of 60 engineers is gearing up for a pilot launch in September
2006 and, if it goes well, a full release to follow. The initial
product: a holographic disc drive that reads and writes 300-gigabyte
discs.


But don't throw out your hard drive just yet. The cost of
InPhase's holographic equipment will be beyond the means of consumers
and most digital-content distributors for some time.


Sitting in front of six holographic disc drive prototypes, Lignos
explains what makes them tick. Inside each breadbox-size drive is an
elaborate system of mirrors, lenses, and liquid-crystal displays that
manipulates the beam from a single laser. The disc, 130 millimeters in
diameter and 3.5 millimeters thick (as compared to 120 millimeters and
1.5 millimeters, respectively, for a DVD), doesn't spin continuously
like a DVD but is mounted on a stage that positions it so that the
right portion is exposed to the laser beams at the right time. The
laser and camera detector are fixed, but the mirrors and lenses move to
produce different beam angles. And that's the real trick: unlike a CD
or DVD, the disc can store hundreds of pages of data in a single, small
area, each one inscribed by the reference beam at a slightly different
angle.


The technology is here. The question now is the size of the market.
"Will it actually get into the hands of many users? We haven't proven
that yet," acknowledges Lignos. For InPhase, the first applications
will lie in high-end archiving for data centers, financial
institutions, and medical centers. In those markets, holographic
storage will compete with magnetic tape, which also has a high storage
capacity but is harder to access. It's also less durable, lasting less
than 10 years, while holographic discs should last 50 years or more.


InPhase also plans to go after high-definition digital video
broadcasting and movie distribution for digital theaters: companies
such as the Turner Broadcasting System want to archive videos; and one
can imagine the next George Lucas extravaganza being delivered to
digital cinemas on one disc instead of a stack of 100.


By 2007, InPhase plans to release a consumer electronics product, a
chip that could hold up to five gigabytes--enough to store a movie or
video game. The chip could compete with flash memory and give handheld
devices the ability to quickly download and play back high-resolution
content on the fly.


InPhase is focusing on video games, where there are fewer global
standards than in movie distribution--making it easier for a small
company to break in with new technology. And holographic discs have an
advantage for content distributors: they are difficult to pirate.
Creating a copy requires the same expensive equipment necessary to make
the original.



Five to ten years out, holographic storage could become a mainstream consumer technology--or a colossal flop.


The still unanswered questions involve the long-term reliability of
the components and, of course, cost. The technology must be dependable
enough to convince customers to trust it with their most important data
yet cheap enough to become ubiquitous.


InPhase will compete with a smattering of other holographic-storage companies. Tokyo-based Optware is targeting consumer video applications with a simpler technology more similar to traditional DVDs. And Aprilis in Maynard, MA, a Polaroid spinoff, is going after some of the same markets that InPhase targets but is also branching out into biometrics applications like fingerprint matching.
"I expect them to coexist for a while, until the better one wins," says IBM's Coufal, an industry veteran who adds that the different companies' approaches are all appealing. "Everybody would love it to succeed....Who will win, I don't know."
But whoever wins, holographic storage could change the rules for information technology by opening up the possibilities of working in three dimensions. Until now, storage--indeed, all of microelectronics--has played out mostly on the surfaces of materials. The benefits of exploiting the third dimension could go beyond storage to include more efficient ways to search ultradense databases, like those that store satellite images for mapping and surveillance; new kinds of displays; and even ultrafast processors whose logic circuits are carved into holographic materials.
"It will take time and some deep pockets," says InPhase's Lignos, "but we finally have the ability to take this to market."
Gregory T. Huang is Technology Review's senior writer.


--------------------

c:\ When the going gets tough, the tough get going ...
Go to the top of the page
 
Bookmark this: Post to Del.icio.usPost to DiggPost to FacebookPost to GooglePost to SlashdotPost to StumbleUponPost to TechnoratiPost to YahooMyWeb
+Quote Post
IIIARSHAA
post 10 Sep 2005, 10:32 PM
Post #2


Moderator
Group Icon

Group: Private Members
Posts: 1060
Joined: 13-June 05
From: carlisle, cumbria
Member No.: 47
Zodiac Sign: I'm a leo!
Gender: I'm a m!



how are they gonna decide wether too use this when they cant decide wether to use hd/blu-ray?


--------------------
user posted image
Go to the top of the page
 
+Quote Post
NickTheGreek
post 10 Sep 2005, 10:38 PM
Post #3


Administrator
Group Icon

Group: Admin
Posts: 110750
Joined: 3-June 05
From: Athens, Greece
Member No.: 1
Zodiac Sign: I'm a leo!
Gender: I'm a m!



this is a whole different technology than optical media...

i am hoping it will finally emerge despite the financial tackles and the marketing obstacles that in our days keep the true progress out of the game


--------------------

c:\ When the going gets tough, the tough get going ...
Go to the top of the page
 
+Quote Post
morbius
post 11 Sep 2005, 01:48 AM
Post #4


Advanced Member
Group Icon

Group: Members
Posts: 214
Joined: 28-August 05
Member No.: 230



I wrote about this technology several times and maybe next month I'll write a long story for a local PC magazine.
In short, InPhase promices their holographic media will be there "in 12-18 months" for a long time, but the disks never actually appear. Holographic media is possible, but it is very complicatet, since it takes two lasers to read the data.
On the other hand, several japanese giants started work on holographic disks and can spend a lot more on their development than InPhase. Unless InPhase strats delivering their product soon, they'll be dead in the water.
Plus, right now consumers do not have need for more srorage, so holographic media will be used primarily for corporate data backup.
Go to the top of the page
 
+Quote Post

Reply to this topicStart new topic
2 User(s) are reading this topic (2 Guests and 0 Anonymous Users)
0 Members:

 



RSS Lo-Fi Version Time is now: 19th March 2024 - 01:41 PM
Skin and Graphics by Dan Ellis and Anubis. Hosting by Forums & More © 2005-2011.
InvisionGames - Your #1 Arcade Games Repository | AllSigs - Signatures for all | Rock Band + Guitar Hero = RockHero ! | The Remoters - Remote Assistance | FileMiners - You ask, We find