Monday, August 28, 2000

FMD's, on the other hand, does not rely on the reflection of a coherent beam to transmit information from the disk to the sensors. With FMDs, the laser light is used only to stimulate the florescent material imbedded in the grooves and pits in the disk's many layers. When the florescent material is charged, it emits its own coherent and incoherent light at a wavelength different from that of the laser. In an FMD's case, though, it is the incoherent light which carries the information, and the different wavelength of the florescent light also serves to greatly reduce interference with the laser. It is because of these features that the C3D team has been able to engineer disks with 10, 20, and more layers, all of whom are perfectly readable at remarkably high speeds of up to 1.0 gigabytes per second.

When everything is tallied, C3D's florescent technology could scale up to an impressive 1.4 terabytes of data storage when applied on a single sided 12cm disk with 100 layers. Since these layers are only 50 micrometers (microns) thick each, there is also no evident size problem with these disks; an important consideration when adapting existing production lines for turning out disks themselves, and the devices that read them.

At this stage, the C3D team is very optimistic when regarding FMDÕs prospects. ÒWith C3D's new FMC and FMD technologies, gigabytes will replace megabytes as data storage's common currency," said Dr. Eugene Levich, president and CEO of Constellation 3D, Inc. "This dramatic expansion in memory capability and concurrent reduction in carrier size will permit all kinds of new devices, such as palm-sized PCs and 'E-books'."

Already, C3D has produced 10 layer CD sized disks capable of holding 140 Gigabytes of data, as well as FMD-drives, and 20-layer FMD-cards named FMCs (Florescent Multi-layer Cards) that can fit in a wallet and hold over 10 Gigabytes of data. As well, C3D has also successfully experimented with 3cm mini-FMDs that hold the same amount of data as a double-layer DVD. Both FMDs and FMCs have been produced in ROM (Read Only Memory), and in a WORM (Write Once-Read Many) format, with research being done into producing a rewritable format. The FMD technology also recently completed its arduous testing period with flying colors, when it successfully completed a 10 000 hour marathon of continuous data access.

According to one analyst, ÒStorage needs are projected to increase more than ten-fold in the next five years. Multi-layering fluorescent data storage technology has the potential to be a key technology that enables storage devices with dramatically higher capacities," says Wolfgang Schlichting, Storage Analyst for International Data Corporation. "The market potential for this technology will increase substantially once affordable recordable products become available."

Recently, C3D announced that it was pushing forward with its production schedule, and planned to deliver final, pre-production test units to major drive and media manufacturers around the time of January, 2001. From there on, Dr. Levich is quite optimistic, stating "We are on track to deliver turnkey disc and drive solutions to certain vertical markets by summer 2001, to be followed by broader consumer market introduction shortly thereafter. This is precisely in line with our business plan and shows we are executing our strategy quite well."

With the apparently successful development of florescent disk technology, C3D has set before us a veritable feast of possible applications, that would leave any engineer drooling in sensory overload. FMDs could prove extremely useful for storing HDTV video for consumer release; a task that could easily eat up 7.5GBs per hour of signal, and therefor out of the league of DVD. FMDs applications as storage for computers, game consoles, and MP3 music files is also without question. All told, the new advent of day-glow technology could face computer users, and other Information Age inhabitants with a situation they've seldom faced; actually having more data storage space than they can use.