IBM Corp has a less than impressive record in turning developments in its laboratories into commercial products, but perhaps that will change when an outsider is installed at the helm, and IBM researchers say they have developed a polymer film that can capture and hold vast amounts of data in the form of hologram images at speeds 100 to 1,000 times faster than current Winchester disk drives. They predict that within a decade such polymer films will be able to store Gigabits of data in a film the size and thickness of a dime. The photorefractive polymer is able to store many holograms in the same section of the material, greatly reducing the amount of space needed to store data. The technique has been demonstrated using inorganic crystals, but organic polymers are easier to work with and much less expensive than crystals. The scientists – from the IBM Almaden Research Centre – say the storage capabilities of the new photorefractive polymers were on the order of 100 times better than the first polymer films, which IBM developed two years ago. The company says that it sees the new polymers eventually being used to replace main random access memory as well as rotating secondary store.
