Erasable Optical Storage Medium

Improved data storage media contribute to improved information infrastructure. Transition metal oxides can be used to fabricaed erasable optical data storage media with substantial advantages over existing erasable optical memory media. Our product will be much easier to fabricated than currently employed technologies thereby producing susbtantially improved yields in terms of both the percentage of each disk which can be used and in terms of the percentage of total disks fabricated which are essentially totally unusable. In addition, our product will likely have a substantially improved bit error rate over disks currently available. Disks and associated drives can be designed so that they can be fabricated using existing technologies. The laser chemical processes constituting the read, write, and erase functions are such that it is possible to perform some logical operations on large amounts of data simultaneously with storage. The medium is not susceptible to electromagnetic pulse (EMP) damage. We propose to fabricated a variety of prototypes and test their storage density, read/write/erase speeds, bit error rate, mean time to failure for the cycle - erase-read-write-read- and other specifications. We anticipate that in Phase I of this SBIR we will be able to fabricate and test three prototypes. Anticipated Benefits: The present commercial civilian market for erasable technology having the speed and storage density of optical media is obviously enormous. In addition to all the same reasons civilians could use improved media, to accomplish its mission, the military particularly needs erasable media with improved bit error rates and greater immunity from damage due to EMP effects. These needs are all met by the proposed product.