Bayer MaterialScience (D-51368 Leverkusen; www.bayermaterialscience.com) has signed a development and supply agreement with US-start-up Inphase Technologies (Longmont / Colorado; www.inphase-tech.com) covering polymer raw materials used in the production of holographic storage media. The Bayer group company will invest USD 5m to acquire equity from Inphase. It has also acquired a license to use the results of the R&D cooperation, along with Inphase´s existing holographic experience and knowledge, to further develop its speciality polymers in applications outside the field of optical storage media.

Inphase was formed at the end of 2000 from Lucent Technologies and Bell Labs. Its holographic discs are claimed to offer 50 times the memory capacity of a DVD and 460 times that of a CD. Using holographic techniques, lasers are used to write the information to a light sensitive polymer. However, instead of writing data on the surface, holography makes use of the entire volume of the storage material.

As part of the partnership, Inphase will launch a holographic data storage medium based on products from Bayer MaterialScience and a recording and reading device with a capacity of 300 gigabytes in 2006. The companies intend to co-develop speciality polymers to make them suitable for the production of discs with a capacity of up to 1.6 terabytes (a terabyte is one thousand gigabytes). They will produce a polymer system in which the interference pattern produces local changes in the material´s refractive index. These tiny changes make it possible for a laser to read the information.

According to Gerhard Langstein, head of new technologies in the new BMS business unit, the “quantum leap” in storage capacity is based on changes taking place in the material on a molecular plane in combination with three-dimen-sional storage. A 1.6 terabyte disc would be capable of storing 780m A4 pages of text, a library of around 4m books, 1.6m high-resolution photographs, ten days and nights of television or 18 months of music.