• SIP
Broadband and Mobile Featured Article
April 24, 2008
InPhase Perfects Holographic Storage
By Richard Grigonis Executive Editor, IP Communications Group
Back in 1971, when I was 15 years old, I became interested in lasers and holography, and persuaded my father to buy (at the then-amazing price of $100) a Baush & Lomb helium neon gas laser. To make a classic hologram (not “holograph”), you use a partially silvered mirror to split the laser beam in two coherent beams. One, the illuminating beam, shines onto the object to be “holographed” and the light bounces off and onto a high definition black and white photographic plate. The other beam (called the reference beam) is sent directly to the front of the photographic plate, but at an angle. The interference pattern recorded on the photographic plate stores the 3-D information about the object. After the plate is developed, you shine a laser beam at the same frequency
and angle of the reference beam onto the plate, stand behind it and, lo and behold, the photographic plate almost acts as a window, reproducing the object in three dimensions (though only in one color).
The amazing thing about a hologram is that information is stored all over the photographic plate equally in the form of interference patterns. If you scratch the plate, you can still see the object clearly. If you just illuminate a postage-stamp sized area of the plate, you can see a miniature 3D-version of the larger image, albeit far more grainy than the “normal” version.
Needless to say, it occurred to technologists that a tremendous amount of information could be stored on holographic plates in a very stable, reliable form. (Indeed, some renegade physicists theorize that the whole universe is a sort of hologram, but we’ll let that one pass for now.)
After hearing about holographic storage being “just around the corner” for 40 years, a company called InPhase Technologies (www.inphase-technologies.com) has developed a real holographic storage device called the Tapestry. It takes 5.25-inch disks (with a 50-year media archive life) that can be written upon by a blue laser, and the system comes in 300 GB to 1.6 TB capacities. The Tapestry can handle a 20 MBps-120 MBps transfer rate and can access data in milliseconds. It’s less expensive than any magnetic hard drive RAID solution. The device supports four levels of error correction, so you won’t be losing any data unless you nuke the device or throw it into an active volcano.
At $18,000 a Tapestry is still a tad expensive to plug into your home PC, but over time the technology is sure to come down in price. Videographers should have a field day with this device.
Interestingly, InPhase is populated by a group that forked off from Bell Labs. When I was a kid tinkering with my Baush & Lomb gas laser, the two great labs to work at were Bell Labs and GE Labs. Years later, I fulfilled a boyhood dream of doing something for Bell Labs when Doug Kirby at the Media Design Studio there brought me in to do some specialized multimedia programming.
And what happened to my own gas laser of 1971? Some people were afraid to visit my house, since everybody thought a laser could punch a whole through a mountain, as depicted in TV series of the time, such as Star Trek. I had this idea for a system that would use a fly’s eye lens and a tunable laser to take a photo in ordinary light, process it with a laser by a company such as Kodak (News - Alert) or Fuji, and then show it as a white-light reflection hologram. Thus photographers could take holograms without having to own a laser or do any complicated work. They just needed a fly’s eye lens for the SLR camera. But I ended up going to college and the gas laser eventually got discarded.
Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC’s (News - Alert) IP Communications Group. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
and angle of the reference beam onto the plate, stand behind it and, lo and behold, the photographic plate almost acts as a window, reproducing the object in three dimensions (though only in one color).
The amazing thing about a hologram is that information is stored all over the photographic plate equally in the form of interference patterns. If you scratch the plate, you can still see the object clearly. If you just illuminate a postage-stamp sized area of the plate, you can see a miniature 3D-version of the larger image, albeit far more grainy than the “normal” version.
Needless to say, it occurred to technologists that a tremendous amount of information could be stored on holographic plates in a very stable, reliable form. (Indeed, some renegade physicists theorize that the whole universe is a sort of hologram, but we’ll let that one pass for now.)
After hearing about holographic storage being “just around the corner” for 40 years, a company called InPhase Technologies (www.inphase-technologies.com) has developed a real holographic storage device called the Tapestry. It takes 5.25-inch disks (with a 50-year media archive life) that can be written upon by a blue laser, and the system comes in 300 GB to 1.6 TB capacities. The Tapestry can handle a 20 MBps-120 MBps transfer rate and can access data in milliseconds. It’s less expensive than any magnetic hard drive RAID solution. The device supports four levels of error correction, so you won’t be losing any data unless you nuke the device or throw it into an active volcano.
At $18,000 a Tapestry is still a tad expensive to plug into your home PC, but over time the technology is sure to come down in price. Videographers should have a field day with this device.
Interestingly, InPhase is populated by a group that forked off from Bell Labs. When I was a kid tinkering with my Baush & Lomb gas laser, the two great labs to work at were Bell Labs and GE Labs. Years later, I fulfilled a boyhood dream of doing something for Bell Labs when Doug Kirby at the Media Design Studio there brought me in to do some specialized multimedia programming.
And what happened to my own gas laser of 1971? Some people were afraid to visit my house, since everybody thought a laser could punch a whole through a mountain, as depicted in TV series of the time, such as Star Trek. I had this idea for a system that would use a fly’s eye lens and a tunable laser to take a photo in ordinary light, process it with a laser by a company such as Kodak (News - Alert) or Fuji, and then show it as a white-light reflection hologram. Thus photographers could take holograms without having to own a laser or do any complicated work. They just needed a fly’s eye lens for the SLR camera. But I ended up going to college and the gas laser eventually got discarded.
Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC’s (News - Alert) IP
Communications Group. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
