May 23, 2002

Taiwan's National Science Council (NSC) announced that a local research team has successfully developed a new generation optical disc to hold more than 100 gigabytes of information.

The research team was led by professor Tsai Ding-ping of the Taiwan National University. The new disc can store the contents of 150 conventional Music-CDs or the equivalent of 20 DVDs, the professor said.

By using the "near field" optical technology, the 100 gigabyte disc is larger than any other similar product in the world. The super-sized disc will be used at home to store large movie or music files, according to the developer.

The "near-field" optical technology allows the bits of information on an disc to be spaced closer together to increase the disc's storage capacity.

The research team is composed of researchers fro the NSC''s opto-electronics panel, the NTU's Graduate Institute of Physics and Ritek Corp., the world's largest optical disc manufacturer.

In 1994, the team began to develop the relevant technology leading to the present breakthrough, about two years after the U.S. Bell Labs started developing near-field optics in the area of digital data.

According to a spokesperson from Ritek Corp., which will manufacture and distribute the new product, this super - CD will come at a per-unit not much higher than present-day DVDs. He even dared to say that, when this super optical disc is available, other storage products, even hard disk drives may become obsolete.