Integrated Optical Heads For Optical Data Storage

The growth of the optical data storage market is dependent very much on the storage cost advantage of this storage solution. Thus, a big emphasis is placed on lowering the overall cost of optical data storage. In the area of lowering the head cost, the trend has been toward the simplification of head design, improvement in manufacturability and integration which is exactly where integrated optics technology could play a major role. Since many applications demand a re-writeable storage system, we will address only the magnetooptical systems. It should however be noted that the write-once (WORM) or CD-ROM systems (by far the biggest) represent a subset of the MO systems with less demanding system requirements.