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Optical

A new disk technology is under development that could store up to 1TeraBytes (1000GBytes).

A new disk technology is under development that could store up to 1TeraBytes (1000GBytes). Researchers at Imperial College London, working closely with colleagues at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, estimate that the "Multiplexed Optical Data Storage" (MODS) disks would cost approximately the same to manufacture as an ordinary DVD.

The leader of the research Dr Peter Torok believes that the first disks could be on the shelves between 2010 and 2015 if his team are able to secure funding for further development. The Imperial researchers and colleagues at Neuchatel and Thessaloniki filed a patent covering their ideas in July 2004.

Under magnification the surface of CDs and DVDs appear as tiny grooves filled with pits and land regions. These pits and land regions represent information encoded into a digital format as a series of ones and noughts.

CDs and DVDs carry one bit per pit, but the Imperial researchers have come up with a way to encode and retrieve up to ten times the amount of information from one pit. Unlike existing optical disks, MODS disks have asymmetric pits, each containing a 'step' sunk within at one of 332 different angles, which encode the information. The Imperial researchers developed a method that can be used to make a precise measurement of the pit orientation that reflects the light back.

"We came up with the idea for this disk some years ago," says Dr Torok. "But did not have the means to prove whether it worked. To do that we developed a precise method for calculating the properties of reflected light, partly due to the contribution of Peter Munro, a PhD student working with me on this project. We are using a mixture of numerical and analytical techniques that allow us to treat the scattering of light from the disk surface rigorously rather than just having to approximate it."

Imperial's press department estimates that the new technology could hold every episode of The Simpsons on just one disk. This is based on 1TByte of data representing 472 hours of film. All 350 scheduled episodes of The Simpsons add up to 8080 minutes (135 hours) of film. Fans of Eastenders - a long-running UK soap opera - will have to put up with more than one disk. Nearer in time, one should look out for BluRay disks, which have five times the capacity of a DVD at 25GB per layer, and are expected to be released towards the end of 2005 for the home market.

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