Six companies to form " Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) Alliance"

February 6, 2005

Six companies including CMC Magnetics Corporation, FUJI PHOTO FILM CO., LTD., Nippon Paint Co., Ltd., Optware Corporation, Pulstec Industrial Co., Ltd. and TOAGOSEI CO., LTD., advocates of "Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD)" announced today to form "HVD Alliance" to accelerate the development of HVD, to develop a marketplace and to promote this revolutionary technology and products. A technical committee, TC44 to discuss the standardization of "Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD)" was approved at 88th Ecma International General Assembly on December 9th 2004. The first TC44 meeting will be held in Tokyo on March 3rd and 4th.

HVD Alliance, through its activities to provide a venue for the technical discussions and information exchange among the disk manufacturers, material makers, device manufacturers and tester makers which agree with the purport of this organization, accelerates the development of HVD, develops the marketplace and promotes this technology, thus contributes to the sound development of the storage industry.Alliance companies advance final preparations towards the official launch of "HVD Alliance" in this coming spring.

Holographic recording technology
Holographic recording technology records data on discs in the form of laser interference fringes, enabling existing discs the same size as today's DVDs to store more than one terabyte of data (200 times the capacity of a single layer DVD), with a transfer rate of over one gigabit per second (40 times the speed of DVD). This approach is rapidly gaining attention as a high-capacity, high-speed data storage technology for the age of broadband.

Collinear technology
Optware's exclusive development of the collinear technology is part of its effort to make holographic recording technology practical. A patented technology originally proposed by Optware founder and CTO Hideyoshi Horimai, collinear holography combines a reference laser and signal laser on a single beam, creating a three-dimensional hologram composed of data fringes. This image is illuminated on the medium using a single objective. Using this breakthrough mechanism, Optware dramatically simplified and downsized the previously bulky and complicated systems required to generate holograms. Further enhancements were achieved with Optware's exclusive servo system. The introduction of this mechanism enabled reduced pickup size, elimination of vibration isolators, high-level compatibility with DVD and CD discs and low-cost operation, effectively obliterating the remaining obstacles to full commercialization.