179th Committee on Photonics Information Systems

1. Outline
   Title of the international Symposium: International Workshop on Holographic Memories (IWHM) 2008
   Date: 20 - 23, October 2008
   Location: Irago Garden Hotel Resort & Spa
   Number of attendees: 126 (102/domestic, 24/oversees)
   　Major attendees from abroad :Kevin Curtis (InPhase Technologies, USA), Gilles Pauliat (l'Institut d'Optique, France), Frank Przygodda (Deutsche Thomson OHG, Germany), Ching-Cherng Sun (National Central University, Taiwan), Xuewu Xu (Data Storage Institute, A*STAR, Singapore), Stanislovas Zacharovas (Geola Digital, Lithuania)
   Total budget : ¥8,289,500 ( including the support from JSPS ¥1,000,000)



2. Contents, achievements and publications
   　International Workshop on Holographic Memories 2008 (IWHM2008) was held at Irago Garden Hotel Resort & Spa hosted by 179th Committee on Photonics Information Systems JSPS, Holographic System Development Forum (HSDF), Tera Bite Optical memory Consortium (TBOC), Research Center for Advanced Photonic Information Memories (APIM) Toyohashi University of Technology.
   　A holographic memory is a promising candidate of one the post Blu-ray optical memory system. A data capacity of 1 Tbite per disc which has same dimension as CD, that is the diameter of 12 cm and the thickness of 1.2 mm and the data transfer rate of 1 GByte/s is expected. To realize this system as a commercial product, further improvements of the recording media, devices, and optical system are necessary. For this purpose, both scientific and technological breakthrough is needed and collaboration with academic society and industrial companies is indispensable.
   　First meeting of this workshop was held in 2007 at Penang Island in Malaysia. It is the second meeting this year. International Symposium on Optical Memories (ISOM) and Topical Meeting on Optical Data Storage (ODS) are the two major meetings on the optical memories. These meetings cover the whole field of optical data storage. The topics treated in IWHM are concentrated on the holographic memory. Attendees are staying same hotel all day long, and can discuss deeply on the well focused subjects.
   　As well as ISOM and ODS, dominant attendees are from industrial companies. Samsung?LG?Daewoo (Korea), Deutsche Thomson?Beyer (Germany), Storex (Romania), Geola (Lithuania) Zebra?InPhase Technologies (USA) are the major companies that attended the meeting.

Table 1 Number of attendees

Table 2 number of presentations for each category

　Number of presentations for each category is listed in Table 2. Two plenary talks were given by two leading companies in this field, Sony and InPhase. They introduced their present states and future prospects. Sony presented the several key technologies in their Co-Axial system. They stated that they will achieve the capacity of 1 Tbits/inch2, and the data transfer rate of 1 Gbps around 2009 or 2010. InPhase explained the details of the technologies to produce commercial products.
　Several invited papers were presented by the speakers from Europe, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. We learned the present state of the development on the holographic memories in the countries outside Japan.
　Quite many contributed papers on the system, recording materials, and signal processing were presented. Also, as a new application field of the recording materials developed for the holographic data storage, a couple of talks were presented on the application of the photopolymers to the 3D holographic displays.
　This workshop emphasizes the poster sessions to discuss the subject deeply without strict limitation of time. Hot discussions could be seen in front of many posters.
　A panel discussion and round table discussions are held to expand the technologies on the holographic memories to other fields such as the 3D displays and others.
　To realize a real commercial holographic memory system, collaboration between private companies seems necessary as well as university-industry cooperative research at this moment and international collaboration. This meeting played a role to accelerate these activities in the future.



Oral session	Poster session




Round table discussion



3. Future issues and prospects
   　The core of the research on the holographic memory was in USA in 1990s. However, apparently the core has been moved to Japan after year of 2000. From the beginning of the CD, Japan has the crucial advantage the field of the optical data storage industries. As a sequence of this fact, the research and developments in the optical memories are not so active outsideJapan at this moment. This meeting will give a driving force to activate the research in this field. We think it is important to hold this meeting every year.

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