Race to holographic storage in full gear

LONGMONT — When InPhase Technologies of Longmont received its second Advanced Technology Grant in two years, it shouldn’t have been surprising — the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was just putting its money where the minds were.

“That’s the reason we came to Longmont in the first place,´ said Bill Wilson, the chief scientist and founder of InPhase. “The reason why we’re here is that almost all of the disk and tape storage research is done here. We came here to put together a product and development team, and we were able to do it with the talent that was already here.”

So perhaps it isn’t surprising, either, that the holographic storage company also found its partner for the second grant just down the road in Longmont. InPhase is the lead company in a joint venture with Displaytech Inc., a leader in liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) microdisplays.

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“We’re within easy walking distance,´ said Mark Handschey, founder and chief scientist of Displaytech. “It’s very easy for us to interact, and that’s really helped to move us along.”

Moving things along is exactly what NIST had in mind for the grant. The $5.7 million project grant includes $2.77 million from the Advanced Technology Program, which will be matched by funds by Displaytech and InPhase — money that is designed to develop the first 1 terabyte holographic image system.

“Our first generation of (200 gigabyte) systems is slated for commercial release in 2005,” Wilson said. “This grant will allow us to push toward more high performance for the system (which features rewritable 5.25-inch disks).

The idea of holographic data storage is at least 30 years old, Wilson said, but today there are suitable components — such as lasers, detectors and modulators — which are commercially available.

“It’s kind of the Holy Grail of photonics,´ said Wilson, who holds a doctorate in chemical physics.

“The one thing we were missing was the media.”

While holographic storage may bring visions of Princess Leah springing out from a Star Wars robot, in fact it’s the storage that is holographic, not the display. The no-longer missing media is now comprised of one-quarter-inch-thick optical polymer disks, and data is written throughout the volume of the media, not just on the surface.

Million bits of info

Instead of recording one bit of information at a time, like conventional drives, the holographic system under development at InPhase actually writes down an image, 1,000 pixels wide and high, allowing one million bits of information to be written with a single flash of light.

By varying the reference beam angle, wavelength or media position, many different holograms can be recorded in the same volume of material.

InPhase believes its current media will carry it through development of a 1.7 terabyte drive, but a pivotal aspect of the high-performance system is development of an advanced spatial light modulator, which is the job at Displaytech.

When Displaytech was formed in 1985, the company was focused on creating input devices for optical computing, but lately its liquid crystal technology is more commonly used in laptop flat panel displays and viewfinders on camcorders and digital cameras.

“In a way we’re returning to our company roots,” Handschey said. While his company has been involved with early academic participation on holographic computing, the new media development at InPhase was the key to getting the ball rolling.

But what NIST wants out of the most recent grant is a system that writes a lot faster than conventional drives. Pivotal to that effort is a spatial light modulator in development at Displaytech.

In essence, the modulator is the piece responsible for taking electric transmissions and turning them into the 1 million-bit image, which is commonly called a hologram.

“In this application you are writing a page of data, a two-dimensional image 1,000 by 1,000 bits, and our device composes that page,” Handschey said.

The optical part of this drive, Handschey said, is where parallel structure allows writing speeds that may not be attainable by more conventional drives. What they are looking for is one-gigabyte per second speed — about 25 times faster than any existing drive.

In addition, the flexibility of the technology allows for the development of a wide variety of holographic storage products that range from handheld devices for consumers to storage products for the enterprise. Developers envision two gigabytes of data could be stored on a postage stamp, 20 gigs on a credit card, or the 200-gig disk that already is scheduled for commercialization.

InPhase received a $2 million Advanced Technology Program grant from NIST last December to create that initial drive, but company officials noted that development has been a cooperative effort that goes far beyond InPhase and Displaytech.

Strong backing

Originally formed as a Lucent Technologies venture, InPhase is backed by investors including New Ventures Partners LLC, Signal Lake, Madison Dearborn Partners, Hitachi Maxell Ltd. (HIMX.F), Imation Corp (NYSE: IMN) and Newton Technology Partners, and many of those investors also are strategic partners in the anticipated commercialization, said Liz Murphy, the vice president of marketing at InPhase.

“A lot of the partnerships we have are with companies that have a (large presence) in the storage industry,” Murphy said. Already, the company, which declined to discuss its revenue picture, is shipping its media to other companies with holographic designs.

But one thing is clear, most of the new development will transpire here in “storage central.”

“When we started, there were no holographic storage engineers anywhere,” Murphy said. “But there was this huge amount of storage talent. What we’ve kind of done is created the first group of holographic storage engineers.”