Ritek has announced it has acquired a technology using near-field recording (NFR) for DVDs from the Center for Nanostorage Research (CNR) of the National Taiwan University (NTU). With this new red laser recording scheme, we could see a DVD that holds 100 gigabytes of data, apparently it not that far in to the future either.
The Blu-ray DVD disc as you may or may not already know, has a storage capacity of 27GB. According to Ritek, this is all that is possible, due to the 'optical diffraction limit", of this technique. The near field recording process on the other hand, uses a red-laser to get around this limitation with a shorter wavelength, Ritek explained.
Under the joint financial support from Ritek, the National Science Council and the Ministry of Economic Affairs, CNR has been developing NFR DVD technology by a team headed by Din-ping Tsai, a professor at NTU's Department of Physics. The NFR technology can reduce the size (diameter) of recording marks to 100 nanometers (nm), much smaller than 400 nm for DVD discs and 900 nm for CD discs, according to Ritek. As a result, red-laser NFR DVD discs will have a storage capacity as large as 100GB, Ritek noted. |
Source: DigiTimes
