A Driveless Read System for Permanently Recorded Data in Fused Silica

A driveless, multilayer read system was demonstrated as applicable to a permanent digital-storage using fused silica. The combination of a low-magnification microscope and signal processing were simple enough to be emulated in the distant future. Test data were recorded in a 2-mm-thick fused-silica plate by a femtosecond laser to form four layers with dot pitch of 2.8 mu m and interlayer distance of 60 mu m. The total recording density was 40 Mbytes/in.(2), which is as high as that of a conventional compact disc. This system achieved a bit-error rate in the order of 10(-3) when reading the test data (without error-correction code) from images taken at a 19.5-times-magnification. Signal processing using unsharp masking and subtraction of images at different focal points effectively contribute to read data from blurred image with the low bit-error rate. (c) 2013 The Japan Society of Applied Physics