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Card sized storage technology still in test

An Israeli startup gave its first US demonstration of technology that it claims will eventually be able to store up to 10 gigabytes of data on a credit card sized carrier and 140Gb on a CD or DVD disk.

  • John Geralds in Silicon Valley
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An Israeli startup gave its first US demonstration of technology that it claims will eventually be able to store up to 10 gigabytes of data on a credit card sized carrier and 140Gb on a CD or DVD disk.

C3D showed its multilayer fluorescent optical smartcard and disk technology, which includes nine-layer disks and ten-layer cards, to a raft of vendors on Tuesday, including Intel, Microsoft, IBM and Apple. The disks hold more than 200 times the capacity of a CD-Rom and almost 30 times as much as the average DVD disc.

Patrick Maloney, C3D's business development director, attested: "It's a truly revolutionary data storage technology that allows the creation of new devices which weren't possible before. This will take us into the new age of the digital home, both in data capacity and in data rates."

He added that data retrieval rates exceeded 1Gb per second because the layers can be read in parallel.

The firm's first offering, which is due to ship at the end of the year, will be a credit card sized Clear Card with up to 200 layers, 400Mb/cm2 of data density and up to 10Gb of capacity.

"What we do is deposit the fluorescent particles right into the clear CD. From there, you can focus the laser on the layer or layers you want to read. The laser excites the fluorescent compound and the system reads the fluorescent light," Maloney explained.

He added that using a clear disk meant there was no obstruction or signal loss and there was no limit to the number of fluorescent layers that could be embedded into the clear storage medium.

Jim Porter, president of analyst firm, Disk Trend, said that C3D was not the first company to make extravagant claims for its still unproven storage technology.

"But these people aren't flakes. Many of them have been around the industry for a long time," he added.

C3D, which has acquired a number of other companies over the past five years, has offices in Silicon Valley, the Ukraine, Russia and Israel.

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