Disruptive Effects of Holographic Technology
What could make the two-way competition for the next generation of optical discs a three-way race? We have HD-DVD and BD-DVD. Is it EDVD? Is it FDVD? Try HVD.
In two weeks, TC44, a technical standards committee of ECMA formed at the 88th General Assembly in December 2004 will meet in Tokyo to discuss four proposed new product configurations based on holographic storage on rotating discs, both read-only and recordable. The activity was initiated by Optware on behalf of the newly formed Holographic Versatile Disc Alliance.
Within 2 years there could emerge an international standard, as ECMA standards may be automatically ratified by the ISO. Before then, products based on the agreements expected to be forthcoming could enter the commercialization process in sample quantities. If things ramped up quickly, within 3 to 5 years after that, economies of scale would kick in and mass markets could begin to form.
We have gone back to the drawing table and plotted the effect HVD would have on the previously stated progressions of Schwerin’s Law for Storage, Media, and Memory Technologies. It pretty much changes everything. Beginning in from 5 to 8 years, the distruptive effect looks like this:
Holographic fixed storage moves incrementally up from magnetic, putting pressure on magnetic density increases, but that’s all we can ascertain until more is known about the comparative cost per terabyte.
Holographic removable storage shifts the trendline fully an order of magnitude upwards from blue laser, exceeding even the remarkable leap in capacity that recordable CD represented to removeable capacity when CD-R/RW hit mainstream five years ago. This puts removable back on track as an order of magnitude and a cycle behind fixed storage capacity, where removable optical slipped behind fixed magnetic in the DVD and blue laser generations.
CMC Magnetics, Fuji Photo, Nippon Paint, Optware, Pulstec Industrial and Toagosei together formed the Holographic Versatile Disc Alliance. Software Architects Inc., InPhase, Pioneer, Panasonic, Strategic Media Technology, Stanford University, Sony, Hitachi, Toshiba, Plasmon, Pulstec, and Philips attended the first meeting as well. IBM, Aprilis, Imation, Dow Corning, Konica, Micron Technology, MemoryTech, Texas Instruments, Intel, Lucent, and Coherent are also involved. That’s a who’s who of storage R&D firms I’d like to see represented in a next generation standard.
These companies, their interests, and the first market forecast for holographic discs in their various product configurations are the subject of an Infotech Forecast: Holographic Disc Market available from Infotech. An ongoing multi-client market research project is also underway. For further information, contact Julie Schwerin at 1.802.649.8700 or email :: info at infotechresearch dot com.
posted by julia b schwerin