PARALLEL OCT READOUT SCHEMES FOR OPTICAL DATA-STORAGE APPLICATIONS

摘要

Future high-capacity optical data-storage media (9) will exhibit a multitude of storage layers (91, 92, ...). In order to gain additional bandwidth compared to conventional storage systems, a multitude of storage layers (91, 92, ...) has to be accessed in parallel. Parallel optical low-coherence tomography (OCT) enables such a high-throughput readout scheme. By using a low-coherence light source (1) in the readout data path, interference signals are only created at exactly one storage depth and hence separate the various storage layers (91, 92, ...) very efficiently. Due to the use of a dedicated smart-pixel image sensor (4), several hundreds of layers (91, 92, ...) may be accessed in parallel at the same time.