Pioneer Electron Beam DVD 302
wordboy writes "Pioneer Electronics just announced that they will introduce an electron-beam recorder for next-generation optical data storage. The electron beam is much finer than that of a typical laser so they are able to achieve densities of 50GB or more with a standard 12cm disc. But can it cook my TV dinner, too?"
Thing is... (Score:5, Informative)
Vibration, however, isn't the biggest hurdle to over come. Since it's likely the media will not be stored in a vacuum, this system will have to compensate for dust and other particles in a much more robust way than the current laser based systems.
Remember IO Meg's Jazz Drive? It sucked because the drive wasn't in a vaccume. That wasn't even laser based, it was magnetic media. Imagine how much of a problem it will be with subatomic particles.
But the truly biggest hurdle will be the price. The media will likely be based on platinum, and I don't see how writable media will be possible any time soon.
full article (Score:5, Informative)
Tokyo, Japan, Apr 2, 2004 - (JCN Newswire) - Pioneer Corporation and its subsidiary, Pioneer FA Corporation, announced today that they have jointly developed a high-precision electron beam recorder (EBR) by utilizing their fine-processing technology and equipment technology, which will make it easier to manufacture master discs for next-generation optical discs such as Blu-ray Discs. Pioneer FA will start selling the new high-precision EBR in early April, 2004.
In the conventional optical-disc mastering process, many disc manufacturers have been using laser beam recorders (LBR), which utilize ultraviolet (UV) lasers or deep-ultraviolet (Deep-UV) lasers as light source. Pioneer's high-precision EBR employs an electron beam as a recording beam to sharply narrow the beam diameter, which can realize even finer pattern processing in the mastering process, compared with LBRs.
The high-precision EBR also achieves high levels of record-positioning accuracy, thanks to the high-precision recording position control technology, which the Pioneer group developed when it started with production of Laser Discs. Pioneer's EBR can manufacture master discs for high-density optical discs including Blu-ray discs, as well as Discrete Track Media and Patterned Media - higher-density hard disks regarded as highly promising future technologies.
Since Pioneer's Corporate R&D Laboratories began basic research on a high-precision EBR in 1993, its results have been presented at academic conferences and study groups. In the meantime, Pioneer's high-precision EBR technology has been highly evaluated as a key technology indispensable for the development of next-generation discs. In addition to that, the demand for such technology has been growing. Accordingly, Pioneer has decided to launch this high-precision EBR.
Pioneer FA expects that the market will expand and plans on promoting the development of next generation EBRs to realize even higher-density recording together with Pioneer.
Main Features:
1) Stable electron beam emission with a large current by utilizing a thermal/field type emitter.
2) Large, high-density recording capacity of 50GB or more on one side of a 12 cm disc.
3) High track-pitch accuracy.
4) High productivity with a load-lock chamber
[Main Specifications]
Electron beam emitter: Thermal/field emission type
Acceleration voltage: 50kV
Modulation speed: 6ns or lower (10% to 90%)
Beam deflector: 2-stage, bi-directional, 10ns or lower (10% to 90%)
Objective lens aperture: 4 positions selectable
Beam diameter/Beam current: 80nm/90nA or more
Spindle motor: Vacuum seal air spindle motor
Rotation speed 60rpm - 2,400rpm
Substrate: Silicone wafer (max. 8 inches)
Focus control: Optical height sensor (range: +/-250micon)
Stage position sensor: Laser interferometer (resolution ability: 0.6nm)
"But can it cook my TV dinner, too?" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SEM? (Score:3, Informative)
In really SEM's aren't *that* fancy, if everyone decided that they were the next must have thing, I can't imagine they'd cost much more than a plasma HDTV. Ultrasound machines are the same way. They're like 95+% margin. I wonder what they cost in India, certainly not what they cost in the US.
Re:It still (Score:3, Informative)
If you're waiting for solid state to be as capacious as moving parts, you're going to be waiting forever; almost by definition, a moving part device will have more volume available to store data in then a solid-state device. (No matter how large your solid-state device, I can create a DVD-like disk even today that holds more then your solid-state device, for reasonable sizes.)
The largest device capacity I saw in there, a 1.5GB device, is still much, much smaller physically then the 300GB monster hard drives you can buy now. (Even extrapolating the density of the 1.5GB flash device to the hard drive's volume, I think the hard drive still wins, and in cost, it's no contest.)
Stop waiting, start buying. As usual, if you wait until the evolution ends, you'll never buy.
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Informative)
If you can create a better master, then your copies will be accordingly better. Even though the disk is digital, it is still a physical medium, which makes the accuracy of the original important.
What this thing looks like is a device that can do a "better" job than an optical system at creating that master disc. Note that this doesn't mean this device can even read what it writes.
So yeah. We really shouldn't care.
Re:Thing is... (Score:5, Informative)
The announcement indicates that they are planning to start commercial shipments almost immediately. Pioneer has been working on this stuff for over 10 years already. You are probably right that this will initially be pretty expensive. Nevertheless, this is an important announcement, indicating that real progress on a key technology has been made.
As an aside, the Iomega Jaz drive was initially a good product. There were two main problems: they cut corners on both the drive and the media in later revisions; and they never owned up to the "clicking" problem, thus causing many people to unnecessarily lose data.
Re:Gackpth (Score:5, Informative)
This technique is for MASTER discs (Score:5, Informative)
It is essentially the same tech that the semiconductor industry has been using for years (decades?) to create masks for photolithography.
I can't imagine how an electron beam recording system would make it into a consumer product. These systems have essentially the same precision technology that scanning electon microscopes have, i.e. they ain't cheap. Plus, it's not just a matter of throwing a master disc "blank" into the unit and pressing go. There are several process steps.
Re:Thing is... (Score:1, Informative)
Actually, for music CDs that don't use the type of error correction data CDs do, this was a big problem until CD Players started employing the use of over-sampling.
But, yes. The same thing would apply to this type of media too.
Electron bean just for mastering (Score:2, Informative)
"Pioneer's EBR can manufacture master discs for high-density optical discs including Blu-ray discs, as well as Discrete Track Media and Patterned Media - higher-density hard disks regarded as highly promising future technologies."
And electrons ditto. Need ION beams to be subatom (Score:1, Informative)
Electrons also have the wave-particle duality. And being light they're big.
If you want a beam to do etching on an atomic scale you need ions, not electons. (Even then, though the individual particles (and their wave functions) are subatomic in size, the beam is still likely to be significantly larger than an atom.)
Re:Thing is... (Score:5, Informative)
The wave-partical duality refered to in quantum-mechanics says basically that since a photon is not a wave of constant amplitude (a picture [uoregon.edu]), it can behave like a particle in some sense (albeight a massless one). Additionally, particles with mass also have wave properties, but with extremely high frequencies.
All that said, not all particles are sub-atomic particles. The particles of potato-chip at the bottom of my bag are not sub-atomic particles. Likewise, nutrinos and photons, while they can pass through atoms and collide with or originate from them, are not subatomic particles. Aside from light being massless, photons are not sub-atomic particles because they are not "glued" inside an atom by electrostatic forces, strong nuclear forces, weak nuclear forces, gravitational forces, or any other kind of force. When an electron/other sub-atomic particle falls into a lower energy state and releases its excess energy as a photon, that photon leaves the atom. Hence, the stars, LEDs, light-bulbs, and all other light-emitting things "work".
Not a computer peripheral (Score:5, Informative)
Note also that the master disk must be written in a hard vacuum (~10^-7 Torr). I suspect the system is actually a modified electron microscope, similar to widely available Focused Ion Beam (FIB) semiconductor processing equipment.
Dr. Null
Re:And electrons ditto. Need ION beams to be subat (Score:3, Informative)
If you want a beam to do etching on an atomic scale you need ions, not electons.
Electron wavelength turns out not to be a problem. Calculate the wavelength, or look at a garden-variety hydrogen atom - you can get sub-angstrom precision with a few dozen eV. Electron beams are typically in the many-keV range (though something small enough to fit in an optical drive's read/write head would likely be hundreds of eV).
Focusing is the biggest problem I can think of offhand (magnetic focusing fields are much less well-behaved than optical lenses).
Whoa... Time Out! (Score:4, Informative)
If I'm not mistaken the article is talking about media mastering, not playback. There's a BIG difference there. Also, the article mentions that the market is expanding, which implies that they have either already sold some units or plan to do so real soon, not 10 years out as someone claimed.
Another point: If you read the specs attached to the article you'll notice the phrase "Vacuum seal air spindle motor". Unless they're referring to something different than what I've worked with, that means getting a rotating mechanism into a vacuum chamber using either a magnetic coupled drive shaft or a rotary vacuum seal.
And for those of you wondering how an electron beam DVD device is going to work with your current PC: Well, the simple answer is that it won't. Not unless you have a vacuum chamber sitting next to your PC and bunch of multi-stage pumps and gas traps sitting underneath. Electrons don't remain focused and usable for very long outside of a vacuum. They tend to either dissapate or show up as sparks or arcs.
And, lastly, to answer someone's question about a homemade SEM. Yeah, you can build one, and it's been discussed [foresight.org] before. It's really not that hard, just expensive (you'll need the previously mentioned vacuum pumps and assorted plumbing, and a couple of precision power supplies in the 10 to 50KV range will come in handy as well).
Electron beam/vacuum workaround? (Score:5, Informative)
This article from the Atlantic Monthly [theatlantic.com] has a recommended workaround for the problems of an electron beam for this kind of storage system not being well-behaved outside a vacuum.
Too bad the author didn't survive to see this technology work. Guess he was a bit before his time.Re:Thing is... (Score:3, Informative)
BTW - gravity was included just to make the list slightly more exhaustive, as it is the only other "sucking" force I could think of off the top of my head.
Re:Thing is... (Score:5, Informative)
Once the media is written with this technique, it will be read in Blu-ray devices; that just takes a laser diode around 400 nm in wavelength. Such diodes aren't exactly common or cheap these days, but they are commercially available, and they're already being used in commercial Blu-ray players.
Mod Parent Down: FUCKING MORONIC (Score:3, Informative)
An electron is less than 10^-18 m [cornell.edu] across. We're talking EIGHT ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE SMALLER. (Yes, the wave-particle duality makes size pretty difficult to measure. But c'mon, think about the relative-size issue here: what would be the point in considering an electron part of an atom if the electron were larger than the entire atom?)
What the hell are they teaching you kids in physics these days?
Re:X-Ray machine anyone? (Score:3, Informative)
Betas are blocked by your skin, after all.
The REAL Problem - Field Emission! (Score:3, Informative)
No, it's not the electron wavelength which, by the way, is only weakly dependent on beam energy (the 50 keV of kinetic enery is still small potatoes compared to the 511 MeV electron rest mass - back to physics 101 for you).
The REAL problem is building the electron emitters. In order to focus the electron beam to a very fine spot, the initial supply of electrons has to be very monoenergetic (monochromatic in optics parlance). This is because charged particle optics are very susceptible to chromatic abberration, where the focal length of a lens is a function of wavelength. Furthermore, since charged particle optics rely exclusively on electromagnetic fields, they cannot leverage all the trickery used in conventional optics to circumvent this effect.
Well, there are a couple of ways to obtain the initial monochromatic source of electrons. First, you can use a traditional thermionic electron emitter (think hot wire) at the input of a crossed field velocity selector (look it up). Unfortunately, that is very inefficient with respect to beam flux (or "luminosity").
The other primary option is to use a cold electron emission source such as "field emission" in which electrons quantum mechanically tunnel out of the cathode under the influence of a very strong electric field. This emission mechanism is specifically mentioned in the article. Typically, this requires an extremely sharp cathode (10s of nanometers), like an etched wire, to achieve the required electric fields at its sharpest point using reasonable voltages (10s - 100s of kV).
Now, here's the tricky bit. With such a high & spatially inhomogeneous electric field, every polarizable particle (like gas molecules) in the chamber will be drawn to the region of highest field strength via a process call dielectrophoresis (the same effect used to separate DNA strands in gel sequencing). Since the highest field region is also the very small tunneling region producing the beam, even a single gas molecule can "poison" the emitter by adsorbing to the surface and shutting down the field emission process.
Even in extremely high vacuum (10^-10 torr and better) the lifetime of "standard" field emitters is typically much too short for industrial purposes. One solution is too build an array of microfabricated emitters for redundancy (the so-called "Spindt cathodes") but that involves its own challenges. Add in the outgassing that is sure to arise from the "burning" process and you've got quite a mess.
Personally, I'd be very interested to know what the mean lifetime of their field emitters is and how is it achieved. Increasing this lifetime, especially for microfabricated emitters, is one of the great challenges in vacuum microelectronics. If solved, the field emission display, essentially an honest-to-goodness flat-panel CRT, could become a viable technology to compete with LCDs, plasma and emergent technologies like large-format OLEDs.
Re:Mod Parent Down: FUCKING MORONIC (Score:3, Informative)
What you are describing are bound electrons (ie, in a Coulomb potential).
Electrons in a beam are free electrons, and would have an effective size limited by the uncertainty principle. So slower electrons would have an effectively higher beam width than fast electrons.
Actually, you can estimate the size of atomic electron orbitals using the uncertainty principle too. Back of the envelope calculation can get you the Bohr radius within a factor of 2 or so.
Re:Thing is... (Score:2, Informative)
One of the things I remember learning about general relativity was, although gravity didn't have a direct effect on the "massless" photon, the photon would still be affected by the distortion in space-time of the object with mass.
Not sure if it worked the other way around - if you could lock a photon in a box with perfect internal reflection (so that the photon couldn't escape), would the "effective mass" of the box be increased by the energy of the photon ala the E=mc^2 relation (where the E of the photon is determined by its wavelength)? If true, then wouldn't you be able to say that the photon had an "effective mass"?
Re:Thing is... (Score:2, Informative)
Each bit of potato chip is composed of many sub-atomic particles. You're abusing the word "particle". Look at the physics definitions at dictionary.com:
(a) is just describing approximations used in problems. It's like saying "massless rod". No such things exist, but in many problems the effects of a rod's mass are so small that we can safely ignore them. And we do so, for the purpose of easier math.
What's left are subatomic particles. (elementary particle = fundamental particle = subatomic particle. #2 and #3 are mutually redundant.)
Likewise, nutrinos and photons, while they can pass through atoms and collide with or originate from them, are not subatomic particles. Aside from light being massless, photons are not sub-atomic particles because they are not "glued" inside an atom by electrostatic forces, strong nuclear forces, weak nuclear forces, gravitational forces, or any other kind of force.
Consider this definition of subatomic:
It doesn't require anything about being a part of an atomic or interacting with one in any way. Just being smaller. And even photons have a "size" (or something that can be used as one - a range of positions that constitutes the bulk of a photon's probability function). Actual sizes vary (what kind of atom? hydrogen? uranium?), but I think it's reasonable to say photons are subatomic.
AFAIK, all particles are subatomic. "elementary", "fundamental", and "subatomic" when used as adjectives to "particle" just mean that someone is using the proper physics definitions. And not the colloquial English ones or the physics approximation definition.
Re:Thing is... (Score:3, Informative)
Not a consumer product (Score:4, Informative)
Their is no suggestion that this is a device aimed at the consumer market. They are selling this as a way to make the master disks used to press consumer disks.