Laser-lit marvels

摘要

High-Resolution and multichannel audio, high-definition video and ever-ballooning hard-drive capacities are motivating the quest for increasingly dense optical storage. Just as today's deep-submicron silicon processes can trace their lithography heritage back to the first transistors, though, leading-edge optical storage is fundamentally a case of shrinking the dimensions but carrying forward the fundamental characteristics of decades' old first-generation approaches see ("Upward spiral: Optical storage (r)evolves to higher capacities, enhanced capabilities," this issue, pg 38).