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Optical Data Storage

A 100,000 Gigabyte On-Line Storage System

Marc A. Friedlander

Published Jan 1, 1983• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report a new optical storage technology (patent pending), and Its applications, which can provide 100,000 gigabytes of on-line storage with nanosecond read and write times, nanosecond access times, and in a volume of one cubic foot. The high storage density, and consequent short access time, is accomplished by three dimensional storage within an unstructured bulk storage medium at a storage density of one cubic micron per bit using visible light. The storage is effected by the photon echo phenomenon which decisively surmounts the problems faced by previous volumetric optical storage approaches. End user cost for production versions will be $100,000 (or 10-8 cents per bit). The Navy is examining the development of a prototype for application to tactical air reconnaissance. The prototype will allow tactical reconnaissance imagery to be received, processed and analyzed in real time as an aid to command decision making. Ground based versions could be applied to the development of large, fully relational data bases due to the presence of Inherent logic elements associated with each bit of the storage system. Highly parallel Input and output capablity as well as the ability to store analog data make it feasible to use the system as an efficient interface point between analog and digital optical information processing systems.

DOI
10.1364/ods.1983.mb4

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We report a new optical storage technology (patent pending), and Its applications, which can provide 100,000 gigabytes of on-line storage with nanosecond read and write times, nanosecond access times, and in a volume of one cubic foot. The high storage density, and consequent short access time, is accomplished by three dimensional storage within an unstructured bulk storage medium at a storage density of one cubic micron per bit using visible light. The storage is effected by the photon echo phenomenon which decisively surmounts the problems faced by previous volumetric optical storage approaches. End user cost for production versions will be $100,000 (or 10-8 cents per bit). The Navy is examining the development of a prototype for application to tactical air reconnaissance. The prototype will allow tactical reconnaissance imagery to be received, processed and analyzed in real time as an aid to command decision making. Ground based versions could be applied to the development of large, fully relational data bases due to the presence of Inherent logic elements associated with each bit of the storage system. Highly parallel Input and output capablity as well as the ability to store analog data make it feasible to use the system as an efficient interface point between analog and digital optical information processing systems.
The speed of modern supercomputers is primarily limited by the relatively slow speed of memory. Research over the past years has focused on developing optical memory systems that, by nature of optics, promise to achieve high speed and high memory capacity. Three- dimensional optical memory systems are well known for their storage capacity and achievable short access time. But the early attempts to exploit 3-dimensional media were limited to photorefractive crystals such as lithium niobate, due to the unavailability of any other suitable medium (alternative media are precluded by their diffraction limited storage densities and non- erasable characteristics). Although volume phase holograms can be recorded in photorefractive crystals, these materials have many obvious flaws such as strong scattering, phase distortion, self diffraction, fast decay, and low refractive index modulation. There have also been continuous efforts to develop new 3-D media (such as photon echo, photorefractive polymers, bacteriorhodusphin, memory access cache, etc., but none can be applied in real world 3-D device because these materials are still in the early stage of development.
The first analysis to our knowledge of the optical data storage density of photon-echo storage is presented. Mainly considering signal-to-noise ratio performance, we calculate the obtainable storage density for data storage and processing using photon echoes to be approximately 100 times the theoretical limit for conventional optical data storage. This limit is similar to that theoretically calculated for data storage by use of persistent spectral hole burning. For storage times longer than the upper-state lifetime the highest densities can, however, be obtained only if all the excited atoms decay, or are transferred, to a different state than that from which they were originally excited. The analysis is restricted to samples with low optical density, and it also assumes that for every data sequence, writing is performed only once. It is therefore not directly applicable to accumulated photon echoes. A significant feature of photon-echo storage and processing is its speed; e.g., addressing 1 kbyte/(spatialpoint) permits terahertzread and write speeds for transitions with transition probabilities as low as 1000 s(-1).
Our goal is to quantitatively evaluate the concept of time-domain optical memory (TDOM) based on the stimulated photon echo technique and to prepare for the development of a working prototype. Earlier feasibility studies at SRI International showed that TDOM can store not only digital data in the form a series of on-off laser pulses but also two-dimensional (2-D) images with the same read/write speed. Despite work at SRI and elsewhere, until now the use of TDOM for 2-D images has not been carefully examined and the quality of echo images and their inherent spatial resolution have not been explored. These issues have an important bearing on TDOM as a high-speed, high-density storage device. This year, we focused on using the stimulated echo technique for 2-D image storage and image processing. Specific tasks included incorporating a gated intensified charge-coupled device (CCD) camera system for detecting echo images, digitally recording the echo images, and optimizing the optical system. We have also extended the earlier feasibility study on stimulated-echo-based, 2- D image storage and image processing and demonstrated storage and retrieval of the high-quality, high-resolution echo images. In addition, we demonstrated for the first time that nanosecond pattern recognition can be achieved using the stimulated echo approach. (Author)
The ultimate memory device would be one in which a bit of data is stored in every atom or molecule within a storage material. Such a memory would have an incredible storage capacity of somewhere in the range of 1022 bits/cm3. Traditional optical memories, whether two- or three-dimensional, can never hope to achieve atomic-level storage densities for the simple reason that minimally sized storage cells always have edge dimensions on the order of or larger than the wavelength of light employed. In the case of visible light, cubic wavelength scale storage volumes contain billions of atoms.
Optical data storage has been interested in several decades because of the potential of fast access time and high-density storage. Recently volume holographic data storage technique has drawn much interest as new materials and improved techniques have developed.1 However, the large of hologram storage is restricted by low diffraction efficiency and mainly focused to read only memory because of the material's characteristic difficult to rewrite in short time interval. Another optical memory technique (photon echo optical memory)2 based on time-domain has developed since 1980's and made big progress for the area of real time image processing and dynamic random access memory. In this technique, data pulses interfere with timely separated write pulse (reference), and their interference pattern is written as population gratings. A read pulse (reference) retrieves each data pulse information as a four-wave mixing process. The write and read pulse separations are restricted by phase and population decay times of the material, respectively, and storage density is determined by the ratio of inhomogeneous to homogeneous linewidths. Even though photon echo technique has advantages of fast access time (≥ ns) and high-density (≥ Mbits/laser spot), its operating temperature is kept extremely low around liquid helium temperature. This is because that homogeneous decay time rapidly shortens as temperature increases due to phonon interactions, i.e., the ratio of inhomogeneous to homogeneous decay rates is ~ 1 at liquid nitrogen temperature (77 K) in a rare-earth doped solid, so that restricts its applications.