Feds Funding Gigabits-Per-Second Optical Storage System Development Project

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, March 29, 1999

Initial Prototype Will Have 50 Gigabyte Disk Capacity, 2 Gb/s Transfer Rate

Call/Recall Inc., the San Diego, Calif., developer of optical storage devices, has been selected by the federal government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a high-speed and high capacity removable storage system for optical media such as next- generation Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) systems and optical disks for computers.

While current optical disk media are an inexpensive means of providing reliable, high capacity, random access storage, they do not yet provide the data readout speed or bandwidth needed for evolving multimedia applications. The DARPA program, called Fast Read-out Optical Storage Technology (FROST), is intended to overcome this limitation by developing an optical system employing a novel 3-dimensional, highly parallel readout approach permitting readout speeds measured in Gigabits-per-second (Gb/s).

Initial phases of the new program will focus on development and integration of the component technologies needed for a FROST prototype. The technologies are evolutions of multilayer, recordable photochromic media being developed by C/R's Materials Div. and related optical interconnects demonstrated by C/R's System Div., laser readout arrays being developed by the Hewlett-Packard Co., stacked readout electronics developed by Irvine Sensors Corp., and data management algorithms and associated electronics design under development by the Univ. of Southern California (USC).

The initial FROST prototype is planned to have a 50 Gigabyte (GB) disk capacity with 2 Gb/s transfer rate. Subsequent versions are planned to lead to 100 GB disk systems with greater than 10 Gb/s throughputs, a several orders of magnitude improvement over both the 11 Mb/s access speed of state-of-the-art DVD systems as well as the 1056 Mb/s speed of the mature PCI bus.

"As the gap between interconnect rates and high capacity storage transfer rates widens, the transfer bottleneck between the processor and data storage is rapidly moving closer to the storage media. The highly integrated optoelectronic technologies to be developed during the FROST program present an opportunity to address new and emerging military applications and multimedia markets," says Rick McCormick, Call/Recall's technical manager of the new program.

"These applications include video and multispectral surveillance from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and satellites, multimedia and virtual reality battle simulation and training, secure mission support data distribution, medical imaging, digital movie editing, and video and virtual reality servers, among others," McCormick says. "These applications typically share the need for high storage capacity -- frequently hundreds of Gigabytes -- and data transfer rates measured in hundreds of Megabits per second to several Gigabits per second."

In addition to the system applications envisioned, the component technologies demonstrated on the FROST program are expected to have applications in transmitters for plastic optical fiber, laser printing, displays, pointers, bar code scanners, optical alignment, microscopy, adaptive optics, fast spectroscopy, fast digital photography, miniature cameras, target tracking, and motion detection.

Multimedia application technologies are forecast to have strong leverage on the global optoelectronics component market as well as being strategically important from a military sense. The Optoelectronics Industry Development Association (OIDA) forecasts explosive growth in the optical storage market from $6 billion currently to $50 billion by the end of 2010, mostly supported by video and computing-related products.

The DARPA effort, initially worth $6.8 million, includes consortium member contributions of $1.3 million.