CD Storage Disk Holds More Data
|
 Courtesy Calimetrics Inc. |
| C alimetrics Inc. of
Emeryville, Calif., has used co-funding from NIST's Advanced
Technology Program to create a new compact disk data storage technology that allows a
full-length HDTV (high-definition television) movie to be stored on a single CD. The
lasers in current disk drives read tiny pits in the plastic CD materials. The lack of a
pit edge is read as a 0 and the presence of a pit edge is a 1. A seemingly endless stream
of 0s and 1s then encodes all the sounds and pictures on a CD-ROM. Calimetrics' system
uses pits of varying depth to allow encoding numbers from 0 to 8. It takes a lot less
space to encode information with nine characters than it does with two. This means that
the Calimetrics system can fit more sound and picture data in a much smaller space and
read the data much faster as well. The color graphic above shows a series of peaks of
eight different heights that were formed with Calimetrics' master disk writing system. |
| Technology at
a Glance article on Calimetrics |
| ATP Project Brief on
Calimetrics |
| Advanced
Technology Program |
| NIST Image Gallery |
