Abstract

Transparent electron trapping (ET) thin films are optical storage media recently developed by Quantex. A 3-D erasable optical memory based on stacked ET thin film layers is presented in this paper. The page memory is written by properly imaging the page composer onto a specific layer with blue laser light at 488 nm. To read out the memory on a specific layer, a slice of a 1064 nm IR beam is guided into the ET layer from the side of the stacked layer media. The orange emission (630 nm) corresponding to the written page memory at that layer is emitted as the result of the IR stimulation. System design considerations, requirements of writing/reading energy, storage capacity, and techniques to overcome the cross talk between adjacent layers are discussed in the paper. The preliminary experimental results are also provided.

© 1992 Optical Society of America