Monday, August 28, 2000

A few months ago, a team of scientists and researchers collectively known as the Constellation 3D Corporation made their first full-scale public relations announcement. The subject of that announcement was of their successful testing of their premier product and pet project - the FMD-ROM.

Since then, this same company has announced a partnership with Rioch Japan - a company whose reputation for development of high quality optical disc drives and associated media products is well established, as well as having successfully negotiated $5 million equity financing from a private fund. Clearly, this is a company which is bullish on the topic of its future.

FMD - the fresh new abbrev. to be married onto the ROM family already well known for the CDs and DVDs that store our Celtic dance music, our B-movie compendiums, and our precious computer database of Grandams' secret recipes. For those of us disinclined to turn anything other than a cynical parting glance at the fresh new twig on the ROM family tree, FMD goes a long way towards distinguish itself from its siblings.

The FMD, if you were wondering, stands for Florescent Multi-layer Disk. Before the cynics out there get the misguided impression that this is a transparent attempt on C3D's part to revitalize the day-glo fashion industry, be assured that what is really being put forth is a long sought solution to the compact data storage quandary. As you may realize, existing CDs, DVDs, and magnet storage devices essentially act as space-age gramophones. That is, a high tech "needle" - a laser in the case of CDs and DVDs, a magnetic sensor among most magnetic media - reads data - in the form of dots, grooves, or magnetized areas - off the surface of a spinning disk.

One problem with this approach - no matter the media - is a finite availability in real-estate. No matter how much you advance your ultra-glorified record player, no matter how sensitive the "needle", and how well you manage to compress and squeeze the data into smaller and smaller areas, the inevitable problem of space comes up on that small, 2-dimensional surface. In fact, once you have compressed the 1s and 0s into the most compact form possible, you are still limited by the available surface area available to write to. The two traditional approaches to tackling this show stopping engineering headache, are to either increase the surface area - resulting in a much larger, bulkier, and power hungry device - or to increase the number of surfaces - either by spreading the data over multiple CDs, or stacking several thinly divided platters in a hardrive.

Another approach that has been persued by researchers at universities, and private organizations for years, is to expand the data storage medium into the 3rd dimension. The 3-dimensional approach would allow much, much more data to be stored on a device of conventional size. C3D has had a something of a breakthrough in the 3-D arena with their FMD technology, which allows multiple layers of data to be printed onto the surface of a CD-sized 12cm disk. This might not seem to novel for those familiar with DVD technology, which allows for two separate layers of data to be printed to either side of a disk. What sets FMD apart is the sheer number of layers that are made possible. Unlike DVD's two layers, FMD is theoretically capable of scaling up to 100 layers or better - allowing for a tremendous amount of data to be stored to a single side of a disk.

The secret behind this incredible layering ability is not a new manufacturing process, but rather an intrinsic feature of FMD that separates it from CD and DVD technology. In order to read information from a CD or DVD, a laser is emitted towards the disc's surface, where data is written as a series of pits and grooves. When the laser encounters a pit or groove, the light is reflected at an angle which causes the laser light to hit a sensor, which registers it as a 0 or 1. The feature that can be considered to be holding back these technologies is the use of coherent light to read data. A beam of light is considered "coherent" when its constituent waves march in regiment, with the ebbs and peaks of each wave marching in perfect timing with its fellows to every side. The problem with this approach as far as we're concerned, is that it becomes very difficult to maintain a coherent beam when your attempting to project a laser through multiple layers. For that reason, DVDs have so far been limited to a maximum of 2 layers per surface.

part 2