Low-Latency Ultra-High Capacity Holographic Data Storage Archive Library
- Akonia Holographics, LLC, Longmont, CO (United States)
Akonia has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in Holographic Data Storage technology using funds from this grant. The most significant achievement that was accomplished during this FastTrack grant was achieving world record experimental bit densities of 2.2Terabits/in2. This is not only a record for holographically recorded information; but to our knowledge is also a record for any type of storage media including magnetic, semiconductor, etc. The second most significant breakthrough that was accomplished by Akonia using this research grant was a very significant advancement in the state-of-the-art photopolymer media. During this project, Akonia achieved a 15x performance improvement over its prior formulations. This amazing breakthrough in photopolymer media performance not only allows more data to be stored in holographically recorded media, but it also will have an significant (and in some cases, enabling) impact on many different fields outside of data storage including: augmented reality (AR), holographic optical elements (HOE’s), optically programmable optical elements, chip to chip optical communications, holographic display, microscope wavefront encoding techniques, and holographic solar concentrators; just to name a few. The advances in photopolymer science done within the scope of this project will have significant impact on wide variety of technologies for decades. This is already being seen by Akonia in the form of a new area of research in augmented reality; in which Akonia is now demonstrating optical components that may be the key enabling component for a light weight AR headset. There were a handful of other very significant improvements that were enabled by this funding and these are shown in the chart below. The only area that Akonia failed to achieve its goal was in the area of increased laser power using laser diodes at 405nm. This is an area of great interest to Akonia and work will continue in this area. Fundamentally, it is an area that simply needs more time and money resources to implement more sophisticated techniques to achieve Akonia’s goals. The improvements in this technology will take some process development effort with an optical coating partner to achieve. Table 1: Performance improvements that were achieved during DOE SBIR grant funding Phase II funding has also allowed us to develop some very promising design concepts that would allow holographic storage to be retro-fit into existing LTO library systems with minimum impact on the library designs. These CAD designs are outlined in Section 3 including a new concept of a holographic media card (HMC) that can be stacked in a group of 5 to 6 and placed in a magazine that is exactly size compatible with an LTO tape, but will be able to hold between 6 and 24 terabytes (in Gen 1 & Gen 2 respectively) of uncompressed data compared to todays LTO6 format which only holds 2.5Terabytes. The main goal of the overall project was to make significant advances in the development of a new ultra- high capacity low-cost and low-latency archive data storage library using holographic data storage as the fundamental storage technology underlying the storage system. This goal has not only been accomplished, the work done on this project will also have significant impact in a multitude of other technology areas as well. Overall, this project has been a major success. Low Latency Ultra-High Capacity Holographic Data Storage Archive Library DE-SC0011282 – Final Report Holographic data storage has the capability to: 1) improve both media and system costs by up to 5x over tape, 2) improve average latencies from 300 seconds to less than 10 seconds due to the random access nature of holographic storage, 3) offer up to 50 years of archive life, and 4) provide a robust and easy to use media that can withstand the higher temperature requirements of newer low-energy consumption data centers, 5) provide data diversity among a data center’s long term storage capabilities. The tasks that we identified that are higher risk but very critical to this overall development were chosen as the main task objectives within Phase 2 of this project. The specific tasks that were chosen for work in Phase II are shown in Table 1. These tasks were specifically chosen to develop design concepts and perform technology demonstrations (where appropriate) such that the risk of moving to commercialization is minimized. There are five main areas that were the focus of the Phase 2 SBIR: 1) Tape Library Compatibility, 2) Media Development, 3) Transfer Rate & Latency, 4) 2 Tb/in2 bit density demonstration, and 5) Modeling. Each of these areas has been split into its own section and the Phase II (Year 1) developments and progress in each area are summarized. Table 2: Phase 2 task list. The completed column shows check marks for when each item was completed. As shown in the chart, there were four tasks that were supposed to be done in Year 2 that where accomplished in Year 1. Likewise, there were three tasks that were moved from Year 1 to Year 2. These were moved for allow us more time on the bit density milestone while also allowing us to push out some of the component work such as the laser and loader to a later date.
- Research Organization:
- Akonia Holographics, LLC, Longmont, CO (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Nuclear Physics (NP)
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0011282
- OSTI ID:
- 1544634
- Type / Phase:
- SBIR (Phase II)
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-AKONIA-11282
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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