Advanced Technologies for the Next Generation Optical Disks

Application areas of optical disk systems have been expanding slowly but stably into the market during these few years. So far optical disks systems are widely used for image and document data storage. This application area is thought to be the most appropriate for the present performances and the functions of optical disks. One of the biggest limiting factor of the present optical disks for applying to directly competitive market with the conventional magnetic disk storage systems is their slow data processing time including data transfer rate, accessing time, and disk rotaion time. These problems have to be solved in order to apply optical disks to more general application areas where conventional magnetic disk storage systems are widely used.