Holographic Challenge for DVDs

Rede Herring ^ | November 28, 2005

[nickcarraway]

While Blu-ray and HD-DVD fight over next-generation DVDs, holographic storage is catching up. November 28, 2005

If you thought Blu-ray and HD-DVD were the only new disc formats coming out this decade, think again. The emergence of holographic data storage technology may hamper growth for the two rival high-definition formats in the years to come.

Holographic data storage has existed for 40 years, but is just coming to the commercial market and may reach the consumer market by 2007. The new DVD formats promoted by Sony (Blu-ray) and Toshiba (HD-DVD) are expected to go on sale in early 2006.

As opposed to the blue laser technology used both in Blu-ray and HD-DVD, holographic storage goes beyond recording the surface of the disc and records through the full depth of the medium.

Longmont, Colorado-based InPhase Technologies has formed an alliance with Hitachi Maxell to sell discs the size of a DVD that can store 300 GB of data. By comparison, Blu-ray discs will be able to hold 50 GB and HD-DVD discs will store about 30 GB. InPhase’s Tapestry holographic system can store more than 26 hours of broadcast-quality high-definition video.

While other technologies record one data bit at a time, holography allows a million bits of data to be written and read in parallel with a single flash of light. So transfer rates are significantly higher than current optical storage devices.

As a result, the holographic discs also can read and write data at 10 times the speed of the DVDs currently in the market, or six times that of blue laser discs.

Commercial holographic discs will go on sale by the end of 2006. The initial product, called Tapestry Media, will come in the form of 130mm discs made from a photopolymer material.

InPhase is currently marketing the product to enterprises that can afford the high cost of the discs and readers. Currently, the reader costs a lofty $15,000 each, while one single disc costs $120—clearly unaffordable for the consumer market, Liz Murphy, vice president of marketing at InPhase, said Monday.

The hopes to fill the archival needs in the commercial markets for specific applications such as security, geospatial imagery, entertainment and broadcast, medical, and scientific applications, Ms. Murphy said.

Consumer Product

However, as the cost of the equipments falls, she thinks InPhase’s technology could compete in the consumer market.

“At some point, holographic storage has the potential for being a consumer product,” Ms. Murphy said. The company is in the process of research and development for consumer applications and is looking for partners in the form of consumer electronic companies that can take the product to that market by 2007.

The technology is also offered by Optware, a five-year-old holographic data storage company based in Kanagawa, Japan.

Someday, it might be possible to put all your music on a postage-stamp-sized chip if consumer-based applications evolve.

In May, InPhase closed a large funding round to help the company commercialize its product (see InPhase Scoops Up $32.1 M). InPhase’s first commercial victory came two weeks ago when Turner Network Television became the first television network to air content originating on holographic storage.

In October, engineers from InPhase and Turner put a promotional advertisement into InPhase’s Tapestry holographic disc as a data file. The ad was recorded by the holographic prototype drive into the disc and then electronically migrated to a server and played back to air at the scheduled time.

“This was done to investigate the feasibility of using holographic storage for broadcasting television content,” said Ron Tarasoff, vice president of broadcast technology and engineering at Turner Entertainment Networks. “This is an ideal way to store high-quality, high-definition movies.”

Although holographic storage technology has great advantages, there will be limited overlap between this technology and blue laser technologies, said Wolfgang Schlichting, an analyst with IDC. Some of its drawbacks are high cost of components and difficulty in mass manufacturing which will take time to evolve.

“Ten years from now, [holographic storage] could work as a replacement technology [for blue laser],” Mr. Schlichting said.

[x5452]

what happens with skipping and this technology?

[Question_Assumptions]

I'm more concerned about scratch and dust resiliency. Just how many scratches can one of these disks have before it isn't usable?

[Terpfen]

How I pine for the days when flash supplants optical media. In the meanwhile, Blu-Ray will do us fine.

[mvpel]

The old magneto-optical disks have an enclosure with a shutter, or think of the old 1GB ZIP disks which have only a tiny opening on the edge into which the read arm is inserted.

[theFIRMbss]

>I'm more concerned about scratch and dust resiliency. Just how many scratches can one of these disks have before it isn't usable?

I think the data
is stored inside something clear.
No "surface" to scratch.

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

"In holographic data storage, an entire page of information is stored at once as an optical interference pattern within a thick, photosensitive optical material (Figure 1). This is done by intersecting two coherent laser beams within the storage material. The first, called the object beam, contains the information to be stored; the second, called the reference beam, is designed to be simple to reproduce—for example, a simple collimated beam with a planar wavefront. The resulting optical interference pattern causes chemical and/or physical changes in the photosensitive medium: A replica of the interference pattern is stored as a change in the absorption, refractive index, or thickness of the photosensitive medium. When the stored interference grating is illuminated with one of the two waves that was used during recording [Figure 2(a)], some of this incident light is diffracted by the stored grating in such a fashion that the other wave is reconstructed. Illuminating the stored grating with the reference wave reconstructs the object wave, and vice versa [Figure 2(b)]. Interestingly, a backward-propagating or phase-conjugate reference wave, illuminating the stored grating from the “back” side, reconstructs an object wave that also propagates backward toward its original source [Figure 2(c)]."

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

300gb on one disk. At speeds 10x that of a DVD. If those speeds approach or surpass 10 mb /sec. for the enterprise, this will be the final death of tape backup. Even at today's prices, it is affordable when compared to the price of a full size TLU using 16-20 tape drives.

[OSHA]

I pine for the days when memory was memory to the core!

[trebb]

When I started as Crypto/Comm maintenance in the mid 70s (AF), we had equipment that utilized core memory (a whopping 512 bytes)- thanks for the memory jolt!

[Terpfen]

I'll settle for flash.

[DManA]

I knew there was a catch.

Currently, the reader costs a lofty $15,000 each, while one single disc costs $120

[Buffalo Bob]

I used to work on name-brand jukeboxes that utilized core memory to track and play the 5 songs you selected when you dropped in your Quarter. Man, that was rock-solid state of the art technology!!

[D-fendr]

I would imagine there'd be some disc protection case in the player to prevent scratches.

The cost has to be conquered first:
"Currently, the reader costs a lofty $15,000 each, while one single disc costs $120"

This may be the technology after next..

[D-fendr]

Yeah but I think it was a buck a bit for core..

[AFreeBird]

So what are we looking at here, about 4K (If that) of memory?

I saw one of those in an old IBM System 3 (I think it was) that was gathering dust at a company I used to work for.

Amazing ain't it?

[kaiser80]

discs the size of a DVD that can store 300 GB

Yeah, imagine that disc go corrupt, damaged etc. Tragedy...

[supercat]

So what are we looking at here, about 4K (If that) of memory?

By my count, 64x64 (4096 bits)

[ImaGraftedBranch]

I saw one of those in an old IBM System 3 (I think it was) that was gathering dust at a company I used to work for. Amazing ain't it?

I am probably dating myself here, but I used to work on an old Burroughs b6500 mainframe, and we had a whopping 640K of hand-wired ram in that baby. Ahh, those were the days.

[TonyM]

Looking to upgrade my Commodore VIC 20. Any ideas?