08国际光存储会议ReportWuhan.doc

8th International Symposium on Optical Storage/ 2008 International Workshop on Information Data Storage (ISOS/IWIDS 2008) in Wuhan (China) The 8th International Symposium on Optical Data Storage took place in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province and center of the optics industry in China from November 24th to November 27th. It was organized by the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (Chinese Academy of Sciences) and the Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics and was held in conjunction with POEM 2008 (Photonics and Optoelectronics Meeting). The talks and poster presentations gave an excellent overview over the present trends in optical data storage and information storage in general and provided insight into the wide range of optical data storage research in China. A number of invited talks in addition reviewed the status and the perspectives in data storage with an emphasis on optical storage. A good overview over the trends in the field was provided by a review presented by Masud Mansuripur (Tuscon, Arizona) who addressed the question if future storage technologies can benefit from existing or emerging nano-tools and techniques? He started his presentation by reviewing the property portfolio and price range for different storage solutions. From this comparison he concluded that hard disk drives face a tough competition from the recent fast advancement of solid state memory. Third generation optical data storage projects are now becoming increasingly widespread in the consumer market. Nevertheless the concomitant price tag might limit the market penetration. Challenges were also seen for more advanced optical data storage solutions due to the high price which would in the near future restrict this technology to high-end applications and would exclude solutions in the field of consumer electronics. Regarding novel non-volatile memories, Everspin (previously Freescale) offers an MRAM memory for around 25 $, yet with a limited storage capacity