InPhase announces partnership with Cypress to improve holographic storage

Holographic storage appeared as a commercial product right after Blu-ray and HD DVD (then called AOD) announced that they will be competing for the consumers’ money. Holographic storage was not a retail product however, it’s a business product and mainly intended for backup and long-term storage. Holographic media is both very fast and sports a tremendous storage capacity (300GB discs are commercially feasible), but also an incredibly high price, which also why the discs are business only.

The new partnership with Cypress is to acquire more expertise in CMOS image sensors. Cypress and InPhase have been cooperating since 2005 to develop a CMOS image sensor fast and sensitive enough to be used with holographics storage technology.

The image sensor is used to read data previously recorded. InPhase praise the high-quality CMOS sensor developed by Cypress and claims to be on the verge of completing the next generation recording devices.

”Holographic storage delivers high capacity by recording data throughout the volume of the recording material, and not just on the surface. With each flash of the laser, a data page of approximately 1 million bits is recorded. Each data page is located at a unique address within the material and several hundred pages of data, each with their own unique address, are recorded in the same location of the medium. Each of these collections of data pages is then referred to as a “book.” This new recording technique enables more holograms to be stored in the same volume of material by overlapping not only pages, but also books of data. This dramatically increases the storage density.”

Cypress on its part believe that holographic storage is the future as it offers one of the storage capacities and densities of storage media available today.

While holographic storage is indeed a possible path for the future, it is not feasible as a retail product and thus we’re doubting it’s possibilities to succeed as a business product. Retail and business have a tendency to go slightly hand in hand when it comes to storage.