The FMD-ROM disc planned for release has 10 (!) layers, compared to a maximum of 2 for a CD, and maximum of 4 for a DVD. What?s even scarier about the disc, which is of the same size as a CD or DVD, is that it can store up to a massive 140GB!</P>
<p>by Adam Duracz
(12/2/2000)
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<p>Well isn't this typical, the DVD format is just starting to root itself on the market, and something just totally better comes along. The good ole' CD-ROM standard stores around 650 (a little bit more in some cases) megabytes on a disc. This is enough for most purposes, such as music, programs or demonstrations, but when you start dealing with high-quality multimedia, such as very high-definition audio, high resolution video or really large games, the CD-ROM is a rather cramping medium. The DVD is better. Storing up to 17GB per disc (double layered, double sided DVD's), this medium is more than enough to store a full-length flick, stored in MPEG-2, with several separate audio tracks for different languages, commentaries etc.</P>
<p>So why look for something that could store more? The answer is obvious. We're never satisfied with what we've got. The next generation of movie discs will probably store video in much higher resolutions than the ones we use today. Maybe the video will be uncompressed, and we will positively have audio tracks with 8/9-point surround, instead of 4/5-point, like we have today. With what I've mentioned, we're already looking at over 40GB of data, which would require the use of more than one DVD per disc, a larger DVD disc format (sized like a LaserDisc) or simply another solution.</p>
<p>Enter the FMD-ROM. The FMD-ROM disc planned for release has 10 (!) layers, compared to a maximum of 2 for a CD, and maximum of 4 for a DVD. What's even scarier about the disc, which is of the same size as a CD or DVD, is that it can store up to a massive 140GB! That's more than 7 times what a DVD can store, and without having to turn the disc! With 140 GB of storage capacity, you could fit over 20 hours of HDTV (MPEG-2 compressed) video, a small library or the contents of your entire CD collection, uncompressed, on a single 120mm disc!</p>
<p>Now some about how it really works. CD-ROM's and DVD-ROM's store data in a way that is embarrassingly similar to Thomas Edison's old gramophone records. Instead of using a needle, though, they use a laser that is emitted onto a surface which is covered with pits or dots that put the laser wave out of phase with the emitted beam. An in-phase beam means a `0', while an in-phase beam means `1'. While this is a perfectly functional solution for a two-dimensional surface, like the surface of a CD or DVD disc, problems start occurring when you try to project the laser through several layers. Beams tend to go out of phase, and so what should have been a `1' becomes a `0', which makes the information pretty useless.</p>
<p>When developing the FMD, Constellation 3D, the company that created the standard, decided to rethink the whole matter. Instead of using pits or dots to store information, they used the fact that a special kind of plastic becomes fluorescent (emits photons / electromagnetic waves) when energized by a laser.</p>
<p>C3D also abandoned the concept of in-phase laser beams to read information. Instead, the light from the fluorescent `pits' can be of a completely different frequency than the laser, which eliminates interference, and therefore also makes the use of multiple layers possible.</p>
<p>Because of the multi-layered fashion of the FMD disks, another interesting feature knocks on the door: fast transfer speeds. According to C3D, FMD disk readers could reach transfer speeds of up to (OMG!) 1GB per second. Please, read that again, because that's more than 20 times faster than any hard drive around today, and 100 times faster than any DVD-ROM drive on the market.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the technology used in FMD's can also be used in WORM-type drives (Write Once Read Many times). This time, however, C3D have planned it to be a 30mm disc made for laptops, digital video cameras and other portable applications that need high capacity storage. Capable of holding over 4GB, however, I can't see a reason why stationary users wouldn't use these discs, dubbed FMD Microm WORM.</p>
<p>Last, but not necessarily least, come C3D's ClearCards. Being the size of a credit card, the initial, writable, models of these things will have 10 layers and have a storage capacity up to 1GB (up to 10GB for the ROM type cards). According to C3D, the ClearCard readers will be completely shock-resistant, and therefore the perfect solution for digital cameras, portable mp3 players or other devices that today use expensive flash-type memory.</p>
<p>C3D have already made prototype stationary readers for the FMD disks, and expect the above described standards to be ready for production before the end of the year. I don't know about you, but I think this may just be the best thing to happen to personal computing since the WWW became publicly accessible.</p>
<p>I've come up with some possible outcomes from the fluorescence based memory, if they ever come up with this kind of memory, that can be written many times.</p>
<p>For instance, they could use memory like this instead of RAM. The memory we use today needs a bandwidth of maybe a max of 10 GB per second for another couple of years. Fluorescence memory has a tarnfer speed of up to 1GB per second today. IF we were to trust the transfer speed of FMD drives to develop like the one of CD-ROM drives, you can trust this speed to increase to 72GB7sec in three to four years - CD-ROM drives went from 1X to 72 X in four, and this memory didn't have the axis of layer amount to increase the speed, which could double the rate of change.</p>
<p>The problem of horrible seeking times with disc drives remains though. Hard disk drives are the fastest seekers of disc memory today, and speeds under 5Ms cant compete with transistor type memory, that is down to a couple of nanoseconds. A better choice than spinning discs would be to use small plates of memory, like the ClearCards have, or even better little cubes of memory. As the fluorescence memory can be scaled in three dimensions, this would greatly increase the memory (volumes increase py the power of 3, not 2 like areas do). Forty cubic millimeters would have fourty times as much space to put memory spaces in as forty square millimeters.</p>
<p>The laser, electron beam (like in TV's, where they would light up a 'TV screen' for `cameras' to read off...), or whatever you would be using to read the information with, would then have to be the thing that moved around the memory, which could be the hardest problem to solve. Bending it using magnetism would be, in the case of the electrons, a good solution, as it would only be a matter of a very high frequency of the magnetic fields bending the beams (like high refresh rates on your monitor...) to attain fast reading times. In the case of lasers, it would require very fast mirrors to direct the laser to the right place.</p>
<p>Things like this are much of a wild guess from my side, but mirrors like these have been successfully tested with something that may well become tomorrow's replacement to CRT's, LCD's and plasma displays.</p>
<p>The best thing, though, comes with the fact that the storage capacity of these, still fictive, `ClearCubes', would be that they could, possibly, be carried around in `lucky charms' or something. If you think about it, it's not as much of a Tamagochi thought after all. You could take your entire desktop with you wherever you go, and just pop it into a PC anywhere, connect, and work like you were at home.</p>
At a closer perspective in time, the FMD-ROM disc drives could be made backward compatible to DVD-ROM and CD-ROM discs, simply by adding lasers for those frequencies.
A little weird this stuff doesn't get more attention, isn't it?
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FMD-ROM, 10 слоев, 140Gb на той же площади -- Nikki -- 13.02.00@08:09 (Чит.: 163)