| The demand for data storage devices has rapidly grown for more than 50 years. Over this period of time, several classes of data storage techniques have been developed and are widely used today. Diverse storage demands have been met with scientific innovations and technological successes. Storage capacities have increased tremendously and consistently over the years without increasing space requirements. Magnetic, holographic, and optical storage techniques are presently being studied in an effort to meet tomorrow's information storage demands. Magnetic data storage has proven to be the most widely used of these techniques to date. However, important fundamental limitations of magnetic storage capacity are quickly approaching, thereby jeopardizing future capacity and performance increases.; The field of optical data storage has enjoyed several important successes spanning various memory applications. One of the advantages of optical storage is its three-dimensional nature. Unlike its magnetic counterpart, information can be written and read throughout a volume of material. This can result in an increase in storage capacity by a factor of 100 or more. A number of optical techniques and materials are presently being studied in an effort to take advantage of this capability. The following pages are a presentation of an instrumental technique to write and read optical data stored in novel materials, including molecular glasses and highly crosslinked polymers. Fluorescent bit patterns are created and readout as binary data in three-dimensions, resulting in a storage capacity greater than 100 GB/cm3. The nature of the storage materials, and the writing and reading techniques used, will be discussed. |
