Posted on 06/21/2002 4:03:49 PM PDT by ATOMIC_PUNK
Philips picks blue lasers for itty-bitty disc
Thu Jun 20, 2:40 PM ET
Richard Shim
Consumer-electronics giant Philips is demonstrating a prototype miniature disc drive that uses a coin-size disc capable of storing nearly twice as much data as a standard-sized CD.
The drive uses 3cm discs that can store up to 1GB of data. Typical CDs, measuring 12cm in diameter, can hold up to 650MB of data. The prototype drive measures just 5.6 by 3.4 by 0.75cm--suitable for use in portable devices such as digital cameras, handhelds and cell phones--but the company is continuing to work to shrink the drive.
Philips issued a release this week, but representatives were not available to comment Wednesday.
The increased storage is made possible by way of blue-laser technology. Blue lasers have shorter wavelengths than red lasers, which are used in current optical CD drives to read data off discs. Philips has been promoting the technology and is one of nine companies in the "Blu-ray Disc Founders." The group is pushing a new blue-laser format for standard-sized CDs, which will increase their capacity to 27GB.
Other Blu-ray founders include Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial, Pioneer, Samsung Electronics, Sharp, Sony and Thomson Multimedia.
Optical drives and discs are less expensive than the flash memory typically used in portable devices today. The low cost of the discs makes the format more appealing to consumers than removable flash memory cards, but adding a new storage technology to devices is expensive, according to Gartner analyst Mary Craig.
"It takes a lot of money to develop and market a mini-drive for devices," Craig said.
DataPlay is also working to add mini-drive technology to portable devices but has taken longer than expected to release a product, Craig said. DataPlay discs will be able to hold 500MB of data and are also just 3cm wide.
"The advantage for Philips is that they have been in the market for years," Craig said.
1 gig on a coin sized device. I can see lots of practical applications.
The disk density is going to be enormously deep on these.
There could be another ten-fold increase in data density , we know how to make black-light lamps.
DVD-Rs, for instance, can only write at 1x (and maybe 2x) speed. Less-dense CD/R and CD/RWs can write at many times higher than DVD-Rs can. DVDs can be read at up to 16x speed these days, but less-dense CDs can be read at over 50x speed.
Is it easier to unload a truck-bed full of very dense and heavy bricks, or ones made of Nerf® material?
:)
Hoosierham: I don't know what effect the shorter wavelength of the blue cobalt laser will have on data transfer over a longer-wavelength red laser, but I just know it's not going to be cheap for a long time to come.
Data transmission rates really depend on the modulation rate and the number of channels. A wave-length division multiplexed (WDM) system with 128 channels at 10 Ghz per channel already carries more than a Tb/second. Backbone bandwidth is NOT the problem!
Lots of people have been working on UV and shorter wavelength lasers. As of recently some semiconductor UV lasers have been demonstrated in lab--the issue has been device lifetime, which needs to be >10000 hours to be practical. Most of the blue lasers took a long time to be commercialized because of the operating lifetime challenge. I suspect the story will be similar with UV.
However, the problem you've stumbled into here is that the encoding method for CD-media isn't just a series of microscopic holes in a substrate layer that you can order a laser to start picking up data from as if it were as simple as dropping a phonograph needle at any random point onto a spinning 33 1/3rd speed LP vinyl record and having it play sound through your speakers -- or in this case, start copying or writing digital data (reading holes/creating lumps) to your computer's memory banks.
The CD laser must know where the microscopic holes begin, where they end, and then uses a decompression algorythm to decipher the arrangement of holes the laser reader picks up over a certain amount of TIME at a given rotational speed. You can't just 'drop the needle on the record' and start getting a fraction of a binary file, so to speak.
You kinda answered your own question when you said 'if the spiral design of the tracks is a problem, then just change it'. A 'change' would mean that it could only feasibly work if the data media is linear in design. What you're describing here in your conveyed description of a stationary array of read (and possibly read/write) heads picking up data from a media source that moves underneath them somehow has already come into existence in the information technology pantheon.
It's called a Magnetic Tape Drive:
You can buy a MUCH smaller version that will satisfy your needs. Go to your local computer store and ask for a cheap 4mm Tape Backup Drive.
That line is the one with the largest implications in several areas. Especially since the CD size has become so standardized. There is no doubt the smaller disk size will have applications yet even to be discovered. However, there are some advantages to the CD size and 27GB will only make things very interesting.
For example, if the current cd drive design with basically read write changes will basically work then why even buy a DVD? If I can get the whole Aliens series all the way through the 11 film on one disk instead of 11 why would I buy a DVD? If Star Wars through episode 15 can fit on one disk, ditto.
Same goes for archiving data. Why would I want 27 small quarter size disks with the chance to lose that single critical one when I can have them all on one CD size disk? Do I want 27 disks to load to find that one peice of info or just one?
Yeah the quarter size is neat for a set of all the phone books in the country in your cell phone, but if you want all the phone books in the world it might be too much to carry around 15 little disks to load while you drive. Having the entire collection of all the laws for every municipality, state, the federal government, and every country in the world with the case law for each might be easier to handle on 100 CD sized disks than 2700 quarter sized disks.
Oops, I guess there will still be some things that will still be hard no matter what size they are.
The real problem is that to get the data density you want, you need tremendous numbers of tracks per inch, in the thousands. So you would need on the order of a thousand laser diode/detector pairs.
A compromise might be some smaller number, like a hundred Laser/Detector pairs, each one associated with an MEMS (MicroElectronicMechanical) actuated mirror to cover only a hundred tracks or so.
From a macro viewpoint, there would be no moving parts, and access latencies would be almost purely rotational.
Uh-oh, I've said to much. Got to hit the engineering notebook now!
And then, maybe the full-size drives can handle the new tiny format and also some in-between ones too.
DVD-compatible optical disk hits 100 Gbytes
Tsai said his prototype is ready to hit the market today, but Wang doubts the market is ready.
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