Current Development Of Optical Information Storage Technology And Its Analysis In The Future

With the development of our society and technology, the information capacity increases geometrically. Therefore the high density data storage technology is hot study field. Among the three traditional storage methods (magnetic storage, semiconductor storage and optical storage), optical storage has many advantages: larger storage density, longer information save time, lower production cost and bigger potential, so optical storage is a promising storage method in the future. The traditional optical storage technology has matured, but the storage capacity and storage density is close to the maximum because of wavelength diffraction limit and the objective lens numerical aperture limit.With the development of several subjects (optical technology, microelectronics, material science, micro processing technology, computer and automatic control technology) related to optical storage, many new optical storage technologies emerge, such as:volume holographic storage, spectral burning hole storage, two photon absorption three dimensional storage, speckle multiplexing storage, waveguide multilayer optical memory, fluorescent multilayer optical storage, solid immersion lens storage, super-resolution near field structure storage, probe scanning microscopy storage, optical bi-stability, multilevel optical storage, multi wavelength optical storage, light wave mixing phase conjugation optical storage, photorefractive storage, phototropic optical storage, electron trapping optical memory. In this paper, the principles of traditional optical storage technologies and the emerging optical storage technology are summarized, their advantages and disadvantages are compared, the general law of development are analyzed and the future development trend of information storage are discussed.