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Scientists earn accolades, funding from storage disk

The National Science Council's (NSC) stunning announcement in May that National Taiwan Uni-versity (NTU) scientists had developed a super-sized optical disk that can hold more than 100 gigabytes of information resulted not only in international attention but also in abundant financial support for the university's research.

On May 16, a NSC-funded research team led by Tsai Din-ping (蔡定平), a professor of NTU's department of physics, displayed three kinds of super-sized optical disks made of different materials that can store as much information as 20 DVDs, or 150 CD-Rs.

According to researchers, the capacity of the super-sized optical disk, which is the same size as a CD or DVD on the market now, is larger than any other similar product in the world.

World attention

The scientists working on the NT$23 million project include Chang Ching-ray (張慶瑞), Chern Ming-yau (陳銘堯) and Huang Huei-li (黃暉理) from NTU and Liu Wei-chih (劉威志) from National Taiwan Normal University.

Ritek Corp (徠德科技), the world's largest producer of optical disks, also contributed to the three-year project that began in 2000.

The scientists decided to use the red-laser technology that is now used for DVDs and CDs, as opposed to the blue-laser technology that many countries are developing especially for use with high-capacity optical disks.

Blue-laser technology is regarded by these countries as better at reading and writing data onto optical disks at very low mark sizes, a mark being the point on the disc that holds information.

Nevertheless, using red-laser technology, the NTU scientists managed to reduce the mark size to 100 nanometers, from the 400 nanometers on a DVD and 900 nanometers on a CD, meaning more information can be stored on the same area of disk.

However, squeezing the information like this requires the use of the near-field effect. Light usually acts as a wave. But at distances shorter than one wavelength, it loses its wave properties and acts like a series of particles in what is known as the near-field effect.

The disk the scientists are developing has two layers more than current CDs: a transparent medium above the recording layer and a "near-field active layer" above that which causes the near-field effect to occur when the laser reads or writes onto the disk. It is these two layers that allow the squeezed information to be read by the red lasers of standard CD and DVD drives.

"Therefore, we can still use existing DVD drives, with different chipsets, to read our 100GB rewritable disks," Tsai told the Taipei Times.

The technology has already received three patents but is still far from being commercially produced, as it will have to be incorporated in global DVD industry standards that are currently being established.

Even so, the NTU's achievement still drew the attention of DVD-research circles in the world when it was announced in May.

Since then, Tsai's Photonics/Nano-Science and Technology Laboratory at NTU has received numerous inquiries from countries all over the world. The laboratory's Web site has had an unusually large number of hits, according to the scientists, and has even been hacked.

Scientists from Japan, which is hoping to develop its own high-density optical disk using blue-laser technology, visited the lab in June clutching Japanese newspapers describing NTU's achievement.

And local manufacturers of DVD drivers and research institutes have offered cooperative partnerships with the lab.

When the ISOM/ODS Joint International Symposium on Optical Memory and Optical Data Storage 2002 was held last month in Hawaii, Taiwan's achievement on producing super-sized optical disks was widely publicized.

Next month, Tsai's team will attend the 7th International Conference on Near-field Optics and Related Techniques being held at the University of Rochester in the US to publish several academic research articles.

Financial support

The team's success in developing ultrahigh-density nano-storage technology will earn NTU generous funding from the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

NTU will sign a contract with the ministry on Aug. 1 that will include five years of funding.

Research into the recording performance of media using nano-optics and nano-magnetics technologies will cost about NT$166 million of the ministry's money and another NT$22.5 million from the NSC.

The funding will also help establish a center devoted to nano-storage research to encourage professionals to enter the field, Chang Ching-ray (張慶瑞), director of NTU's department of physics, told the Taipei Times.

NTU will also focus on bio-medical imaging applications and nano-lithography in the semiconductor industry.

NSC Chairman Wei Che-ho (魏哲和) told the Taipei Times that Taiwan's high-tech development is heading in the right direction as a result of cooperation between industry and academia.

"I think the NTU's research on high-density optical disks is just one good example that demonstrates how academic circles are gradually increasing their influence on industry," Wei said.
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