Boffins light way to photonic computing with 1PB DVD tech Successive generations of optical media generally rely on a new laser and a medium capable of responding to the new laser's qualities. And so it is with a new piece of research, titled Three-dimensional deep sub-diffraction optical beam lithography with 9nm feature size [PDF], revealed today that it may one day be possible to …
"Does anybody still copy music tracks to CD's or DVD's?"
Yep, and pictures too.
Admittedly I'm a paranoid SOB who wants a hard (well, physical) copy of his data in case the internet breaks at the same time as my laptop. Or, more likely, my backups on the cloud are lost/deleted/corrupted/seized-by-the-feds, and I only find this out when I'm trying to restore everything after my laptop gets nicked/burnt/dropped/hit-with-an-EMP.
You do know that, unless you use an archive-quality medium, those discs will fade over time. Found that out the hard way as a collection of recorded DVD have slowly begun to deteriorate (thankfully they're low-priority backups these days so I could tolerate the loss of the data within).
Unfortunately I too have found DVDs do deteriorate with time and become all but impossible to read. If caught early enough one may find that GNU DDRescue might help you out of a tight spot and manage to retrieve your photos, data etc from a going bad DVD backup. A useful tip is that if you make two (or more) identical DVDs at the time of doing the backup then DDRescue stands a better chance of restoring one identical merged copy from the failing copy/s.
I wonder when this new technology (if it ever reaches mass production) will have to use GNU DDRescue or not (It would be great if the media were to be a lot more resilient to bit rot ! ).
Note: that there are similarly named DD Rescues out there and the one that works for me is the GNU version DDRescue (note no space between DD and Rescue).
This uses both a very clever computer generated hologram (optical phase plate) to give the doughnut beam and also some very clever chemistry to deliver 2 separate photo activated reactions.
Note that's lambda/42 and that's without a)UHV system and b)a $10m+ synchrotron.
The downsides are you can't write 2 lines very close together and its direct write (serial) processing.
OTOH what if you write a 300mm wafer with a 100 simultaneous beams?
The holy grail of optical storage? I think not. But damm clever and with lots of potential. Worth a thumbs up.
To understand why that's worth considering remember that Intel proudly talks up its 22nm manufacturing process and innovations to extend its life, but has to contend with the fact that electrons won't get smaller any time soon which makes it hard to build chips on smaller scales.
The concept of 'size' is pretty patchy when talking about quantum mechanical objects like electrons, but nanometres are probably somewhere between six and eleven orders of magnitude bigger than anything you could call the 'size of an electron', so it's not really relevant as a limiting factor on current photolithographic fabrication techniques.
I "invented" a primitive version of this a while back, at the time it was intended to get around a limit on etching of materials for 3D printer uses.
My version used local heating combined with a BRD laser to spot heat materials in order to ablate the surface with a cheaper laser, avoiding the need to buy multiple $100+ 600mW diodes and expensive optics.
AC
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