Nanotech to increase DVD capacity to 850 GByte
Iomega believes DVD media to remain competitive with upcoming optical storage technologies such as Blu-ray and HD-DVD: Nanotechnology could multiply the current maximum capacity to 8.5 GByte by a factor of 40 to 100, the company said.
The DVD appears to be far from its end of life according to Iomega's discovery. The firm was granted two patents that cover a specific use of nanotechnology in combination with optical data storage as well as a "method and apparatus for optical data storage." In the patent description, Iomega talks about a technique of encoding data on the surface of a DVD by using reflective nano-structures to encode data in a multi-level format.
This technology, named AO-DVD (Articulated Optical - Digital Versatile Disc), allows more data to be stored on a DVD and could allow future optical discs to potentially hold 40-100 times more information with data transfer rates 5-30 times faster than today's DVDs. Iomega believes that such media could be manufactured at costs similar to those of DVDs.
The firm said it is currently "working to investigate the commercial feasibility" of this format and other nano-structural data encoding formats such as a "NG-DVD" (Nano-Grating - DVD), which uses nano-gratings to encode multi-level information via reflectivity, polarization, phase, and reflective orientation multiplexing.
The DVD appears to be far from its end of life according to Iomega's discovery. The firm was granted two patents that cover a specific use of nanotechnology in combination with optical data storage as well as a "method and apparatus for optical data storage." In the patent description, Iomega talks about a technique of encoding data on the surface of a DVD by using reflective nano-structures to encode data in a multi-level format.
This technology, named AO-DVD (Articulated Optical - Digital Versatile Disc), allows more data to be stored on a DVD and could allow future optical discs to potentially hold 40-100 times more information with data transfer rates 5-30 times faster than today's DVDs. Iomega believes that such media could be manufactured at costs similar to those of DVDs.
The firm said it is currently "working to investigate the commercial feasibility" of this format and other nano-structural data encoding formats such as a "NG-DVD" (Nano-Grating - DVD), which uses nano-gratings to encode multi-level information via reflectivity, polarization, phase, and reflective orientation multiplexing.
Comments