Ritek have announced it has acquired a technology transfer concerning near-field recording (NFR) for DVDs from the Center for Nanostorage Research (CNR) of the National Taiwan University (NTU) that could lead to red-laser NFR DVD discs with a storage capacity as large as 100GB.
Under the joint financial support from Ritek, the National Science Council and the Ministry of Economic Affairs, CNR has been developing NFR DVD technology by a team headed by Din-ping Tsai, a professor at NTU’s Department of Physics.
Currently, a Blu-ray DVD disc has a high storage capacity of 27GB but capacity expansion is bounded by the “optical diffraction limit”, Ritek indicated. NFR technology uses red-laser to execute near-field recording at distances much shorter than this wavelength to evade the diffraction limit, Ritek explained.
The NFR technology can reduce the size (diameter) of recording marks to 100 nanometers (nm), much smaller than 400 nm for DVD discs and 900 nm for CD discs, according to Ritek. As a result, red-laser NFR DVD discs will have a storage capacity as large as 100GB, Ritek noted.
Ritek will be a licensed user of the NFR DVD patent for five years, with royalty payments of 1.5% of its sales revenues from the discs, the company said. Ritek expects to start volume production of NFR DVD discs in 2007.
Story source:
digitimes.com.
