TuCl (Invited) 1:30pm - 2:OOpm

Holographic Data Storage or Reliability; a Status Report

Hans Coufal IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center K18DI,650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120 P: 408-927-2441 F: 408-927-2100

Holographic data storage has the potential for high density data storage with fast optical access and very high data transfer rates. In the last three years considerable effort has been mounted by several start-up companies, government-supported consortia and academia to explore the feasibility of holographic data storage with parameters that are of technological interest. These efforts have been motivated by the need to store an ever increasing amount of information at decreasing cost and improved performance. Recent progress in consumer electronics provides liquid crystal TVs as spatial light modulators (SEM) and CCDs from video camcorders with excellent performance a t an interesting price point. This progress in the component area and recent development of improved recording materials has encouraged the renewal of interest in holographic data storage.

In holographic data storage two-dimensional data pages from a SLM are imaged with an object laser beam onto a corresponding detector array, preferably matched pixel-to-pixel. With pages as large as one thousand by one thousand pixels with dimensions of 10 pm2 each the imaging by itself is a formidable task. This is further complicated by the requirement to store the wavefront somewhere along the imaging path in a suitable photosensitive medium, by superimposing a coherent reference beam. For media of sufficient thickness, several holograms can be stored in the same piece of media by changing the wavevector of the interference grating between object and reference beam with a
suitable multiplexing method. This can, for example, be accomplished by changing the

angle between object and reference beam, by changing the wavelength of the light, by rotating the recording volume, etc.. A particular data page can then be read out by illuminating the recording volume with the original reference beam, i.e. addressing it appropriately, and reconstructing the original object beam. To avoid erasing the stored data by the act of reading it out, i.e. non-destructive read-out, the interference pattern has to be "fixed" in the media.
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For holographic data storage to be of technical interest it has to com

established storage techniques on the basis of cost per megabyte and performance. Key performance parameters are data rate, access time and storage density. For a large capacity holographic storage device, high density of the stored data at low media cost would of course translate into low cost per megabyte. All of this has to be provided reliably, i.e. at a Bit-Error-Rate that compares favorably with conventional storage techniques on media with archival quality. Holographic storage demonstrations have shown the potential for the error free read out of a data page of one thousand by one thousand pixels in one millisecond for a data rate of one Gigabit per second. A density of one hundred bits have been stored in a one pn22 area of Iron doped Lithiumniobate by another group. We were successful in storing and retrieving a 30 sec MPEGl encoded video clip error free, and another partner in the Holographic Data Storage System (HDSS) consortium showed an all solid state holographic ROM device with the form factor of a standard disk drive. Holographic data storage has come a long way in the last two years. These and other demonstration projects are very promising and shed light on the physics and material science of holographic data storage. But there are many open issues that have to be solved, foremost in storage materials. Issue in optics, integration and suitable channel electronics are also of considerable concern. This presentation attempts an up-to-date review of the status of holographic data storage and will highlight the open technical issues.

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