Wideband optical storage

Abstract

This paper has five purposes. First, to focus upon the key relationships that bound the technology choices for large, archival, digital storage devices; second, to identify the motivations for selecting the optical technology for a petabit-exabit level storage system (10 to the 15th to 10 to the 18th bits); third, to present a generic example and a specific implementation of a terabit-level optical storage device; fourth, to characterize the global design space constraints that will allow one to build a technology-limited optical store; and fifth, to sketch the outline of the BYTERON concept, a wideband 10 to the 16th to 10 to the 17th bit optical store concept and contrast its performance to that of an optical store that is in operation today