NTT To Manufacture Holographic Memory Next Year

[Janak Parekh]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.ntt.co.jp/news/news04e/0402/040212.html' target='_blank'>http://www.ntt.co.jp/news/news04e/0402/040212.html</a><br /><br /></div>"Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation is pleased to announce the results of its work on the research and development of a new high capacity memory storage device, designed with a multi-layered waveguide structure and based on a thin film holography. NTT has successfully produced a 100-layer postage stamp-sized media prototype with 1 GB memory capacity constructed from plastic material, and a small prototype drive for reading data from the Info-MICA media. Following the progress in creating both the media and drive prototypes, NTT is now planning the future commercialization of these products based on the 'Comprehensive Producer Function' and is currently working with technology manufacturers with a view to releasing both products next year using the name 'Info-MICA: Information-Multilayered Imprinted CArd).'"<br /><br />Wow. Holographic memory? I know people have been working on it, but it sounds like we're closer to it being realized than I initially thought. I'm no materials scientist, but I know holographic memory eventually holds promise in reducing the cost for large amounts of storage. It sounds like the technology will initially be read-only, but who knows where we'll go from there. 8)

[goofy166]

You need a laser to read a holographic memory and a much more complex device to write to H-memory. Check the 25GB drive:

http://www.ntt.co.jp/news/news04e/0402/040212_2.html

and here is the media:

http://www.ntt.co.jp/news/news04e/0402/040212_3.html

[dmacburry2003]

You need a laser to read a holographic memory and a much more complex device to write to H-memory. Check the 25GB drive:

http://www.ntt.co.jp/news/news04e/0402/040212_2.html

and here is the media:

http://www.ntt.co.jp/news/news04e/0402/040212_3.html


Ohhh, ahhhh, that thing looks VERY neat :D It sort of looks like a souped up CD reader laser mechanism thingy. Just shows us how small it will be. Put a few PB's in that baby and I'm sold.

[ricksfiona]

The media certainly has a good amount of 'wow' factor. Looks like those cards that you always see Star Trek TNG engineers swapping in and out of the ships computers. Can we be far behind that ;-)

Seriously, doesn't the drive mechanism look chunky? You have SD cards that are pretty close to that size and already hold 1GB and the future holds for more data to be squeezed onto this format.

Also, I believe this technology will initially be slower than what we currently have available.

What does this technology hold in terms of capacity and speed I wonder for the future? I once read in Wired magazine that a pinky-finger size of holographic material would be able to hold terrabytes worth of information. Does this still hold true? Wouldn't you like that on your Pocket PC? ;-)

Correction: After reading the whole article, my questions have been answered. This is pretty amazing stuff. This looks like a DVD-ROM replacement. It would be more durable, cheaper AND you couldn't copy it directly to another holographic media (though you could copy it to DVD recordable drive)... Bummer you can't write to it. For now.

[szamot]

...well if it has moving parts it is ultimately doomed for portable memory. SD cards are about the same size and the prototypes are up to 2gig. I guess I just don't see the excitement.

[Robotbeat]

These holograms are not like the "white-light" holograms you see on stickers and credit cards. They must be viewed using a light source of only a very singular wavelength (i.e. an exact color). Lasers are ideal for these types of holograms.

Actually, I work in a lot of holography at my college (Bethel College is renowned as maybe the most active undergraduate physics program with optics and holography in the nation). I just got back from the physics lab where I was looking at some of the time-average holographic interferometry of a handbell when driven at a certain resonant frequency (well, my lab group will be doing that with cymbals, instead). Holography records retrievable information down to about a wavelength of light (some holographic films can go to even a fraction of a wavelength), which is about 1/2 of a millionth of a centimeter, besides that some of the data is actually stored in the depth of the holographic plate/film. So that works out to be about 1/4 of a terabyte of data per square centimeter, if it is stored ideally. It is pretty hard to store data ideally, though. I would bet that it would be hard to get a tenth of that. So, we're looking at about 100 GB per square inch. And that will go up.

In fact, many DIFFERENT holograms can be stored at different angles inside the volume of a single cube, and that sort of storage can allow about two or three orders of magnitude greater capacity. So, if ultraviolet holography is used for this (ultraviolet has a shorter wavelength than regular light), it has the possibility of storing a petabyte of data on a single square cube that you can put in your pocket, but that won't happen for a while (decade). But all of these are techniques are things that physicists use and have access to.

Well, I guess I should give an example of how high of a data density can be stored on a hologram... Okay. Holograms store the actual wave-pattern of the light coming in (the light is only of one exact frequency, so like light coming from a laser that has had the beam spread out), so it is very much a direct copy of the object being holographed as far as the light is concerned. That is why one does not use a lense between the object and the holographic plate. Holography is lense-less! But that doesn't mean you can't still use lenses. For instance, one could focus an image of a document onto one spot of the hologram with a lense and leave the rest of the hologram unexposed. After the hologram has been developed (usually done in a close by darkroom by yourself, not a Kodak technician :wink:), one "replays" or views the hologram with another laser. The wave-form of the focused image of the document is still on that little spot! It's just like it was still sitting in front of you, so if it was out of focus then, it needs to be refocused now. All of that information is just coming from that one little spot (provided the holographic film is of high enough quality)!

Also, in a hologram, every single miniscule point of the hologram contains a complete image of the object, albeit from only that angle. So if you took a hologram of a document and then broke the holographic plate into little pieces, you could see the whole document using any single little shard of the hologram (although it would be like looking at the document through a tiny little window).

Anyways, holographs can store an incredible amount of data. And they look cool.

[possmann]

:jawdrop: It's neat to see where technology is going - it will be interesting to see how this develops in other formats in years to come - like everyone else here, I don't see any immediate (within 2-5 years) use in portable devices yet...

[Ken Mattern]

One of the joys of reading science fiction is that you can read about today’s technology (and the technology of the future) from books that are decades old.

Robert Heinlein wrote about the use of a "Welton Finegrain" memory cube years ago. I think it was from one of the Lazarus Long stories. I remember reading it when I was a kid, I'm over fifty now. This cube was to be the size of a sugar cube and hold phenomenal amounts of data.

Isaac Asimov wrote about Pocket PC like devices in his story "The Feeling of Power" (search for Asimov at http://esspc-ebooks.com) back in the 1940s.

I used to give speeches and presentations back in the pre IBM PC days when we had to deal with any number of operating systems, 8k of RAM and cassette storage. I gave up making predictions of the future of computing when the developments I was predicting came to be before I gave the presentation.

Life surely is exciting.

[adaptor]

Really small memory. :lol:
I have only one question: When it will be :?: l