Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!rutgers!columbia!cs!maguire
From: maguire@cs.columbia.edu (Gerald Q. Maguire)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: delay lines for memory
Message-ID: <156@cs.columbia.edu>
Date: 24 Mar 89 23:19:15 GMT
References: <21976@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <28411@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <1257@houxs.ATT.COM>
Organization: Columbia University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 37
In-reply-to: beyer@houxs.ATT.COM's message of 17 Mar 89 18:36:25 GMT

I first gave a talk which described using optical delay lines for data
storage in spring 1986 in Belgium and in The Netherlands. Following a
later talk which included this idea - I was ask by Dave Sincoskie of
BELLCORE if I had compared it to a disk, I had not at the time but
since have. This comparison and the limits to this technology are
described in a paper:

@Inproceedings[Maguire89c,
        Key=<Maguire>,
        Author=<G. Q. Maguire Jr. and P. R. Prucnal>,
        Title=<High-density optical storage using optical delay lines:
                Use of optical delay lines as a disk>,
        Organization=<SPIE - The International Society for Optical 
		      Engineering>\,
        Booktitle=<Medical Imaging  III>,
        Year=<1989>,
        Month=<January>,
        Volume=<1093>,
        Pages=<6 pages>
]

For those who are interested and can't wait for the proceedings, send
me e-mail and I'll mail you the PostScript version of this file (which
is 42173 bytes long). This file includes the diagrams.

I hope to find a student interested in building a prototype which will
act much like a SCSI disk (in having logical sectors), but with
considerably faster access time.

I anticipate a major application of this technology to be in local
swap space (as there are no moving parts and 500MB will fit within a 9
liter volume using a single frequency and much less volume if you
freq. multiplex - but you then increase the size and complexity of the
optics) and for image processing it makes an image from among 100T
bytes of image data available within 1 sec.

Chip