History of optical storage media

CD-ROM, introduced in 1982

CD-R and CD-RW in 1988

DVD was rolled out in 1996

DVD-R in late 1997

DVD+R in 2002
As of 2007, future development beyond HD DVD
and Blu-ray Disc appear to be based upon one or
more of the following technologies, all in varying
stages of development:
•Holographic data storage.
•3D optical data storage.
•Nearfield optics.
•Solid immersion optics
•Discs utilizing very short wavelengths such as UV
or X-rays.
•Layer selection discs (LS-R).
•Multi-level technology.
•Complex pit shapes allowing multiple channels to
be stored on one track.
•Wavelength multiplexing techniques.
 Optical Storage Technology
Association (OSTA)

An international trade association which

promotes the use of recordable optical
technologies and products
RNA might be the oldest data storage medium , now
replaced by DNA in most organisms.
 Optical disc recording
technologies and modes
• Overburning>
• Buffer underrun protection>
• Packet writing>
• CD Disc-At-Once>
• CD Track-At-Once>
• DVD-R Disc At Once>
• Session At Once>
The optical lens of a CD drive.
 Optical disc
• flat, circular, usually polycarbonate disc

• data is stored in the form of pits (or bumps)

within a flat surface, usually along a single
spiral groove that covers the entire recorded
surface of the disc
• data is generally accessed when a special
material on the disc (often aluminium) is
illuminated with a laser diode

• pits distort the reflected laser light

 OPTICAL MEDIA TYPES
• Laser disc>
• CD>
– 5.1 Music disc
– SACD
– Photo CD
– CD-R>
– CD-ROM
– CD-RW>
– Video CD
– SVCD
– CD+G
– CD-Text
– CD ROM XA
– CD-Extra
– CD-i Bridge
– CD-i
• Mini Disc>
• DVD>
– DVD-R
– DVD+R
– DVD-R DL
– DVD+R DL
– DVD-RW
– DVD+RW
– DVD-RW DL
– DVD+RW DL
– DVD-RAM
– DVD-D>
• HD DVD>
– HD DVD-R
– HD DVD-RW
– HD DVD-RAM
• Blue Ray Disc (BD)>
– BD-R
– BD-RE
• UDO>
• UMD>
 3D optical data storage

Any form of optical data storage in which

information can be recorded and/or read
with three dimensional resolution
• potential to provide terabyte-level mass
storage on DVD-sized disks
• data recording and readback are achieved
by focusing lasers within the medium
• because of the volumetric nature of the data
structure, the laser light must travel through
other data points before it reaches the point
where reading or recording is desired
• nonlinearity is required to ensure that these
other data points do not interfere with the
addressing of the desired point
• In order to record information on the disc a
laser is brought to a focus at a particular
depth in the media that corresponds to a
particular information layer
• When the laser is turned on it causes a
photochemical change in the media
• As the disc spins and the read/write head
moves along a radius, the layer is written
just as a DVD-R is written
• The depth of the focus may then be changed
and another entirely different layer of
information written
• The distance between layers may be 5 to
100 micrometers, allowing >100 layers of
information to be stored on a single disc
• In order to read the data back, a similar
procedure is used, except this time instead
of causing a photochemical change in the
media the laser causes flourescence
• This is achieved by using a lower laser
power or a different laser wavelength
• The intensity or wavelength of the
fluorescence is different depending on
whether the media has been written at that
point, and so by measuring the emitted light
the data is read
 As the disc spins, it moves the laser beam along the
track

Schematic representation of a cross-section through a 3D optical storage

disc (yellow) along a data track (orange marks). Four data layers are
seen, with the laser currently addressing the third from the top. The laser
passes through the first two layers and only interacts with the third, since
here the light is at a high intensity
 Examples of 3D optical data storage media

Written
Call/Recall Mempile media
media

D-Data DMD
FMD and drive

Landauer Microholas
media media in action
 Holographic storage
• stores information optically inside crystals
or photopolymers
• non-volatile, sequential access
• either write once or read/write storage
Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD)
• an optical disc technology which would
hold up to 3.9 terabytes (TB) of information
– approximately 5,500 times the capacity of a
CD-ROM
– 830 times the capacity of a DVD
– 160 times the capacity of single-layer Blue-ray
discs
– about 4 times the capacity of the largest
computer hard drives as of 2007
• employs a technique known as collinear
holography
 Collinear Holography
• Two lasers, one red and one green, are collimated
in a single beam
• The green laser reads data encoded as laser
interference fringes from a holographic layer near
the top of the disc while the red laser is used as the
reference beam and to read servo information
from a regular CD-style aluminium layer near the
bottom
• A dichroic mirror layer between the holographic
data and the servo data reflects the green laser
while letting the red laser pass through
Picture of an HVD
 3-D Holography Breakthrough:
Erase And Rewrite In Minutes

• Science Daily (Feb. 6, 2008) — University

of Arizona optical scientists have broken a
technological barrier by making three-
dimensional holographic displays that can
be erased and rewritten in a matter of
minutes.
Views of an automobile (top) and of a human brain (bottom) from the
updatable 3-D holographic display developed at The University of
Arizona College of Optical Sciences in collaboration with Nitto Denko
Technical Corp., Oceanside, Calif. The 3-D images were recorded on a
4-inch by 4-inch photorefractive polymer device
OPEN TO DISCUSSION
• Overburning is the process of recording
data past the normal size limit
• Many disc manufacturers extend a
recordable disc to leave a small margin of
extra groove at the outer edge
• This lead-out was originally intended to
provide tolerance for the read head of an
audio CD player should it overseek, by
providing a padding of up to 90 seconds of
silent digital audio >
• A buffer underrun occurs during recording
if the recorder runs out of data in the
recording buffer
• Once the laser is on, it cannot stop and
resume flawlessly; thus the pause
necessitated by the underrun can cause the
data on the disc to become invalid
• With buffer underrun protection, the laser
is able to stop writing for any amount of
time and resume when the buffer is full
again. The gap between successive writes is
extremely small >
• Packet writing is a technology that allows
optical discs to be used in a similar manner
to a floppy disc
• Packet writing can be used both with once-
writeable media and rewriteable media >
• Disc-At-Once or DAO for CD-R media is a
mode that masters the disc contents in one
pass, rather than a track at a time as in
Track At Once
• DAO mode, unlike TAO mode, allows any
amount of audio data (or no data at all) to
be written in the "pre-gaps" between tracks
>
• Track-At-Once or TAO is a recording
mode where the recording laser stops after
each track is finished and two run-out
blocks are written
• One link block and four run-in blocks are
written when the next track is recorded>
• Disc At Once recording for DVD-R media
is a mode in which all data is written
sequentially to the disc in one uninterrupted
recording session
• The on-disk contents result in a lead-in area,
followed by the data, and closed by a lead-
out area >
• Session at Once recording allows multiple
sessions to be recorded and finalized on a
single disc
• The resulting disc can be read by computer
drives, but sessions after the first are
generally not readable by CD Audio
equipment >
• Laserdisc (LD) was the first commercial
optical disc storage medium, and was used
primarily for movies for home viewing

• The standard home video laserdisc is 30

cm (11.81 inches) in diameter and made up
of two single-sided aluminum discs layered
in plastic and bonded with glue
Laserdisc (left) compared to a DVD/CD (right) >
• A Compact Disc (CD) is an optical disc
used to store digital data, originally
developed for storing digital audio
• The technology was later adapted and
expanded to include data storage (CD-
ROM), write-once audio and data storage
(CD-R), rewritable media (CD-RW),
SACD, VCD, SVCD, PhotoCD, PictureCD,
CD-i, and Enhanced CD. CD-ROMs and
CD-Rs remain widely used technologies in
the computer industry
• A Compact Disc is made from a 1.2 mm
thick disc of almost pure polycarbonate
plastic and weighs approximately 16 grams.
A thin layer of aluminium or, more rarely,
gold is applied to the surface to make it
reflective, and is protected by a film of
lacquer

• Standard CDs have a diameter of 120 mm

and can hold up to 80 minutes of audio
The pits in a CD are 500 nm wide, between
830 nm and 3,000 nm long and 150 nm deep.
• The spacing between the tracks, the pitch, is
1.6 μm
• A CD is read by focusing a 780 nm
wavelength semiconducter laser through the
bottom of the polycarbonate layer
• The pits and lands themselves do not
directly represent the zeros and ones of
binary data. Instead, Non-return-to-zero,
inverted (NRZI) encoding is used: a change
from pit to land or land to pit indicates a
one, while no change indicates a zero
 CD-ROM Data
Physical size Audio Capacity
Capacity

12 cm (standard) 74–80 min 650–703 MB

8 cm (mini-CD) 21–24 min 185–210 MB

"Business card" ~6 min ~55 MB

• Double layer (DL) media have two
independent data layers separated by a
semi-reflective layer
• Both layers are accessible from the same
side, but require the optics to change the
laser's focus
• Traditional single layer (SL) writable media are
produced with a spiral groove molded in the
protective polycarbonate layer (not in the data
recording layer), to lead and synchronize the speed
of recording head
• Double-layered writable media have: a first
polycarbonate layer with a (shallow) groove, a
first data layer, a semi-reflective layer, a second
(spacer) polycarbonate layer with another (deep)
groove, and a second data layer
• The first groove spiral usually starts on the inner
edge and extends outerwards, while the second
groove starts on the outer edge and extends
inwards >
 CD-R (Compact Disc-Recordable)
• The polycarbonate disc contains a spiral groove,
called the "pregroove" (because it is molded in
before data is written to the disc), to guide the
laser beam upon writing and reading information.
• The pregroove is molded into the top side of the
polycarbonate disc, where the pits and lands
would be molded if it were a pressed CD; the
bottom side, which faces the laser beam in the
player or drive, is flat and smooth
• The polycarbonate disc is coated on the
pregroove side with a very thin layer of
organic dye
• On top of the dye is coated a thin, reflecting
layer of silver, a silver alloy, or gold
• Finally, a protective coating of a photo-
polymerizable lacquer is applied on top of
the metal reflector and cured with UV-light
• A blank CD-R is not "empty"; the
pregroove has a wobble, which helps the
writing laser to stay on track and to write
the data to the disc at a constant rate>
Compact Disc ReWritable (CD-RW)
• While a prerecorded CD has its information
permanently written onto its polycarbonate surface,
a CD-RW disc contains a phase-change alloy
recording layer composed of a phase change
material, most often AgInSbTe, an alloy of silver,
indium,antimony and tellurium
• An infra-red laser beam is used to selectively heat
and melt, at 400 degrees (Celsius), the crystallized
recording layer into an amorphous state or to anneal
it at a lower temperature back to its crystalline state
>
• A MiniDisc (MD) is a magneto-optical
disc-based data storage device
• The disc is permanently housed in a
cartridge (68 × 72 × 5 mm) with a sliding
door, similar to the casing of 90 mm floppy
disc
• the disc is a random-access medium
• At the beginning of the disc there is a table
of contents (TOC, also known as "System
File" area of the disc)
 Anti-skip
• MiniDisc has a feature that prevents disc skipping
under all but the most extreme conditions.
• Older CD players had once been a source of
annoyance to users as they were prone to
mistracking from vibration and shock.
• MiniDisc solved this problem by reading the data
into a memory buffer at a higher speed than was
required before being read out to the digital-to-
analog converter at the standard rate required by
the format.
• The size of the buffer varies by model.
A Mini-CD is 8 centimeters in diameter >
DVD ("Digital Versatile Disc" or
"Digital Video Disc"
• DVD uses 650 nm wavelength laser diode
light as opposed to 780 nm for CD. This
permits a smaller spot on the media surface
(1.32 µm for DVD versus 2.11 µm for CD)
• A DVD disk has several layers, which are
made of plastic. All layers have a thickness
of 1.2 mm. An injection used on a
polycarbonate plastic (this plastic can resist
very high and low temperatures) leads to
the creation of microscopic bumps.>
 DVD-D
• DVD-D is a self-destructing disposable
DVD format
• It is sold in a cardboard sleeve, and begins
to destroy itself after several hours
• DVD-D now exists as one time play only
for movies, limited time play for video
games, and recordable DVD-D>
HD DVD / Blu-ray disc comparison
• Currently, Blu-ray discs have a higher
storage capacity than HD DVD discs
(50 GB vs. 30 GB)
• Although HD DVD standard allows for an
as-yet unused triple-layer 51 GB disc >
 Blu-ray Disc (BD)
• High-density optical format for the storage of
digital information, including high-definition
video
• The name Blu-ray Disc is derived from the blue-
violet laser used to read and write this type of disc
• Because of its shorter wavelength (405 nm),
substantially more data can be stored on a Blu-ray
Disc than on the DVD format, which uses a red
(650 nm) laser and CD (780nm)
• A Blu-ray Disc can store 50 GB, almost six times
the capacity of a DVD.
Front side of an experimental Blu-ray Disc>
 Ultra Density Optical
• An Ultra Density Optical disc or UDO is a
5.25" ISO cartridge optical disc which can
store up to 60 GB of data
• Utilises a design based on a Magneto-
optical disc, but using PhaseChange
technology combined with a blue violet
laser
UDO>
 Universal Media Disc (UMD)
• developed by Sony for use on the
PlayStation Portable
• can hold up to 1.8 gigabytes of data
• Dimensions: approx. 65 mm (W) × 64 mm
(D) × 4.2 mm (H)
• Maximum capacity: 1.80 GB (dual layer),
900 MB (single-layer)
• Laser wavelength: 660 nm (red laser)>