InPhase Technologies, a specialist in holographic data storage, announced that it has successfully demonstrated a data density of 200GB per square inch, significantly higher than any other optical format.
InPhase achieved this breakthrough by using its patented polytopic recording method, which will be implemented in all generations of the Tapestry drive family. The first generation drive, targeted at a 300GB capacity on a single disk, will be available in 2006. This will be followed a family of products ranging to 1.6TB capacity in 2009.
Holographic storage delivers high capacity by recording data throughout the volume of the recording material, and not just on the surface. A data page of approximately one million bits is recorded in one exposure of the laser. Each data page is located at a unique address within the material and several hundred pages of data, each with their own unique address,. They are recorded in the same location of the medium. A collection of data pages is referred to as a book. This new recording technique enables more holograms to be stored in the same volume of material by overlapping not only pages, but also books of data. This dramatically increases the storage density.
This new recording method is implemented in conjunction with an optical architecture developed by InPhase, which uses optical lenses with a high numerical aperture (NA). The combination of the new recording method and high NA lenses results in a smaller page size that provides a 10X increase in achievable data density. This also increases the data transfer rate, and InPhase has demonstrated a transfer rate of 27MB per second at density.
For more information, visit www.inphase-tech.com.
