Multi-Wavelength DNA Optical Storage Media

In recent years, secondary storage has become a bottleneck in portable computing and electronics for government, industry, and consumers. Enhancements in storage will continue to lag microprocessor advances for years to come. Nanotronics, Inc. has initiated a research effort that promises to change the paradigm in mass storage, thereby enabling up to 100 times improvement in planar surface storage capacity with concurrent increases in data transfer rate. Nanotronics has developed enhanced deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) polymers that will absorb excitation light energy at a single wavelength and re-emit predetermined multiple wavelengths, all occurring at ambient temperatures. By emitting spectra rather than binary on/off bits, the data word size is increased significantly and parallel access is enabled. Data will be stored in the molecular structure of synthetic DNA, bringing true nanotechnology to science and industry. The diffraction limit of current optical storage systems will be circumvented because data bits per unit area will increase with the number of distinguishable pre-programmed wavelengths. Thus^ wavelength is the third dimension for this optical data storage scheme. Furthermore, a four-dimensional secondary storage scheme may be possible by adding a third spatial dimension that would further multiply the storage density. ^'^