Posted on 08/13/2021 9:32:50 AM PDT by Red Badger
Purdue University innovators have created technology aimed at replacing Morse code with colored “digital characters” to modernize optical storage. They are confident the advancement will help with the explosion of remote data storage during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Morse code has been around since the 1830s. The familiar dots and dashes system may seem antiquated given the amount of information needed to be acquired, digitally archived and rapidly accessed every day. But those same basic dots and dashes are still used in many optical media to aid in storage.
A new technology developed at Purdue is aimed at modernizing the optical digital storage technology. This advancement allows for more data to be stored and for that data to be read at a quicker rate. The research is published in Laser & Photonics Reviews.
Rather than using the traditional dots and dashes as commonly used in these technologies, the Purdue innovators encode information in the angular position of tiny antennas, allowing them to store more data per unit area.
The proposed anisotropic metasurface from Purdue University innovators has significant potential for high-density optical data storage, dynamic color image display, and encryption. Credit: Alexander Kildishev, Purdue University
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“The storage capacity greatly increases because it is only defined by the resolution of the sensor by which you can determine the angular positions of antennas,” said Alexander Kildishev, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in Purdue’s College of Engineering. “We map the antenna angles into colors, and the colors are decoded.”
Technology has aided in increasing storage space availability in optical digital storage technologies. Not all optical data storage media needs to be laser-writable or rewritable.
The majority of CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs are “stamped” and not recordable at all. This class of optical media is an essential part of disposable cold storage with a rapid access rate, long-lasting shelf life, and excellent archival capabilities.
The making of a Blu-Ray disc is based on the pressing process, where the silicon stamper replicates the same dot-and-dashes format the final disc is getting. A thin nickel coating is then added to get a negative stamp. The Blu-Rays, as well as DVDs and CDs, are just mass-produced.
“Our metasurface-based ‘optical storage’ is just like that,” said Di Wang, a former Ph.D. student who fabricated the prototype structure. “Whereas in our demo prototype, the information is ‘burnt in’ by electron-beam lithography, it could be replicated by a more scalable manufacturing process in the final product.”
This new development not only allows for more information to be stored but also increases the readout rate.
“You can put four sensors nearby, and each sensor would read its own polarization of light,” Kildishev said. “This helps increase the speed of readout of information compared to the use of a single sensor with dots and dashes.”
Future applications for this technology include security tagging and cryptography. To continue developing these capabilities, the team is looking to partner with interested parties in the industry.
Reference: “Enabling Optical Steganography, Data Storage, and Encryption with Plasmonic Colors” by Maowen Song, Di Wang, Zhaxylyk A. Kudyshev, Yi Xuan, Zhuoxian Wang, Alexandra Boltasseva, Vladimir M. Shalaev and Alexander V. Kildishev, 27 January 2021, Laser & Photonics Reviews.
DOI: 10.1002/lpor.202000343
Ping!..................
It will probably be more durable because it can be stored in glass, as opposed to magnetic tape.
Maw taught code and teletype during WW II. She was a Sargent. Met Paw at Hickam.
She could type like a banshee but we could never get her on a Computer,never interested
So, it’s not “dots and dashes” so much as “binary” that they are abandoning?
My third grade science fair project in 1963 was on Morse Code. It’s still best for human consumption in a pinch.
Ignorant people trying to explain things to ignorant people.
Morse code in printed fashion, can be read by those who suffer color blindness.
‘Should’ the new form ever be printable, one would hope it would not befall a technician with any degree of color blindness.
I think they’re replacing binary (light/dark) with octal (8 antenna orientations). Maybe that would allow encoding 4 times as much information in the same area. The metaphor of Morse Code is not very helpful.
Funny.
Always wondered if it was possible to mark and encapsulate in color then pack them into Lambdas making existing media more dense with information...
So, it’s not “dots and dashes” so much as “binary” that they are abandoning?
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That’s a good question. It appears that they are still using an 8 bit word, but the angular views allows more data to be “stacked” in the same space. Just a guess.
The metaphor of Morse Code is not very helpful.
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Agree. It doesn’t really help to clarify the nature of the technology at all.
I don’t think they are abandoning binary so much as they have come up with a new way to represent binary. It appears that the rotation of the recorded ‘blip’ plus the colors it reflects are interpreted as a string of binary values. This is probably more compact but I would guess that registration of the media before actually reading will be extremely critical. Additionally since the color spectrum is used as part of the differentiation in interpretation of value, there is quite a lot of expansion available.
Looks promising ...
It is pretty slick to use color to store images. That is more like parallel than serial storage.
And Congress will then take lots of money again from Hollywood and enact more laws protecting Hollywood.
The entire home audio/theater market was destroyed thanks to Congress.
Its still there but a shell of what it could have been.
It is more like storing an entire byte in a single media element rather than as a sequence of eight bits each in a separate element. This is “byte parallel” rather than “byte serial”. Each “baud” holds a byte, not a bit.
Titanic was the first ever to send a CQD for help.
Miniature diffraction gratings used to encode machine-readable colors. More dimensions for data storage and steganography, adding a selection of colors to the traditional zeros and ones.
Brings to mind DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing), which uses diffraction gratings to discriminate data channels by color and greatly increase the data capacity of fiber optic cables.
So, going to trinary, instead of going to quadranary?
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