Japanese giants back holographic storage

Six companies have collaborated to accelerate the development of "revolutionary" Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) technology that offers 200 times the capacity of a single layer DVD.

The firms behind the HVD Alliance include CMC Magnetics, Fuji Photo film, Nippon Paint, Optware, Pulstec Industrial and Toagosei.

Holographic recording technology records data on discs in the form of laser interference fringes, enabling existing discs the same size as today's DVDs to store more than one terabyte of data, with a transfer rate of over 1Gbps (40 times the speed of DVD).

This approach is rapidly gaining attention as a high-capacity, high-speed data storage technology for the broadband age.

The HVD Alliance, which will launch officially this spring, has formed a technical committee to discuss the standardisation of HVD. It will hold its first meeting in Tokyo on 3-4 March.

Optware's collinear technology forms a key element in the holographic recording process for HVDs, combining a reference laser and signal laser on a single beam. This creates a three-dimensional hologram composed of data fringes, and the image is illuminated on the medium using a single objective.

Using this breakthrough mechanism, Optware claims to have "dramatically simplified and downsized" the previously bulky and complicated systems required to generate holograms.

The latest developments will fuel further debate over next-generation DVD formats.