New optoelectronic erasable storage medium (review)

An analysis is made of the characteristics of erasable recording media intended for optical data storage, including thermomagnetic media used in disk memories. A new class of optoelectronic media based on multilayer structures is considered. It is shown that the density of the data recorded in such media can reach 10⁵ bit/mm² and the energy of an optical write pulse need not exceed 10^–12 J. The use of such media is opening up extensive opportunities for optical programming and redundancy. The rate of exchange of data in an optoelectronic storage device can reach 10¹¹ bit/sec.