ECMA-423 Standard on Physical, Optical and Mechanical Characteristics of Holographic Storage Disk

Ecma International published on 27 June 2023 a new standard that specifies the physical, optical and mechanical characteristics of a Holographic Data Storage Disk (HDSD) that employs holographic recording to enable data interchange between disks.

HDSD is 120 mm diameter holographic disk has a nominal capacity of 1TB. It consists of a recording layer, a track for positioning at data recording and reading, a reflective layer, and a substrate arranged above and below to physically protect these layers.

2D digital data is recorded as a hologram with refractive index change (holographic fringe) in the volume of the recording layer of the disk by the interference between a signal beam modulated in 2 dimensions by a digital mirror device and a spherical reference beam. The recorded holograms are read by a spherical reference beam as data reading beam using the diffraction effect from the holograms.

With the growing data usage, generated by large volumes of data in various fields and increasing communication speed, the market for digital data storage is rapidly expanding, including large-scale industrial data centers for IoT, big data, and cloud services, as well as cloud storage for personal use and personally managed storage. The market for data backup and archiving is also expanding. With a new hologram recording method, HDSD enables an efficient use of hologram recording resulting in an increase in storage and archiving capacity.

ECMA-423 (Holographic Data Storage Disk (HDSD) – Capacity: 1TB/disk) was developed by Ecma Technical Committee 31 and is available free of charge from the Ecma International website.