in050374
Covering the Period from June of 2004
through May,
2005
Title of INCITS Subgroup: Optical Digital Data Disks
Links:
In recent years, standards for optical disks and their cartridges have been formalized by ECMA/TC31 first and then submitted to JTC 1 as fast-track candidates by ECMA, which holds Category A Liaison in JTC 1. B11’s activities have correspondingly declined to its own administration and its TAG assignment for JTC 1/SC23. However, the work of SC11 was recently merged into SC23, which now encompasses:
“Standardization in
the field of removable digital storage
media other than hard disks utilizing optical and/or magnetic recording
technology for digital information interchange, including:
- algorithms for the lossless compression of data
- volume and file structure"
The INCITS Executive Board changed the status of B11 from maintenance to an active TC in October of 2003. As a result, the Chairman at that time, John Neumann of Open Strategies, resigned. The current Chairman, Terence Nelson representing Panasonic Technologies, was appointed in July of 2004. Following reactivation, which meant members had to pay dues again, the membership declined and currently stands at 3, which is one short of the formal requirement set forth in Section 4.3.4 of the RD-2.
During the period covered by this report, B11 has responded to all INCITS requests for maintenance of national standards and recommendations on SC23 issues including approval of the following fast-track ballots:
B11’s biggest challenge is to find another useful role to play besides its SC23 TAG assignment. Actually, SC23 itself mainly processes fast-track submissions from ECMA. The real work on optical-disk specifications is being done by industry groups, which translate their specifications into formal standards in ECMA/TC31. Unfortunately, TC31 was unable to unify competing writable DVD standards. It is not clear whether TC31 will even be chosen to process the competing next-generation Blu-ray and HD DVD specifications.
In reporting B11’s recommendation on SC23N1297 (New Title and Scope of SC23), we noted:
“Some of the members commented to the effect that the scope of B11 itself should not change. This may not be relevant to the SC23 ballot but should be of interest to the INCITS Executive Board.”
Apparently the EB was not interested, because in041279 subsequently informed us that:
“At the September 2004 meeting of the INCITS Standards Development Board (SDB), the disbandment of maintenance Technical Committee INCITS/B5, Flexible Magnetic Media and Formats, was recommended to the INCITS Executive Board. It was noted that with the transfer of SC 11's PoW to SC 23, the TAG assignment for those activities was transferred to INCITS/B11, the US TAG to SC 23.”
The situation as we understand it is that the tape people have gone to sleep in ECMA/TC17 and walked away from JTC 1/SC11 and INCITS/B5. It appears unlikely that B11 will have enough members familiar with tape technology standards to make informed recommendations on maintenance items formerly assigned to INCITS/B5. Some members may be willing to recommend confirmation on the grounds that withdrawing standards does no good and may do harm. However, other members evidently feel their input has been ignored and may just abstain on the tape items.
All issues have been handled by email so far in the current period.
A meeting would be useful to prepare for the next SC23 Plenary, which will probably be co-located with an ECMA/TC 44 meeting in Kyoto scheduled for the last week of November.
|
Meeting Number |
Date |
Location |
|
73 |
TBD |
Teleconference |
There have been no Liaison Activities during the period covered by this report. However, SC23 has a liaison with ISO/TC171. SC23n1331 invited comments on ISO/TC 171/SC 1 N 200, New Work Item Proposal on Electronic imaging – Classification and verification of information stored on optical media.
|
Position (and training date) |
Name and organization represented |
|
Chair |
Terry Nelson, Panasonic Technologies |
|
Vice Chair |
vacant |
|
Secretary |
vacant |
|
International Representative |
Terry Nelson, Panasonic Technologies (acting) |
|
Vocabulary Representative |
vacant |
The list provided by the INCITS Secretariat is up to date (as far as we know) except that email to K. Nakashima of Fujitsu is bouncing.
Current optical storage technologies all employ semiconductor lasers to write data on removable media and to retrieve the data as needed with the help of semiconductor detectors. However, a diverse array of optical systems can be used with an even more diverse array of encoding schemes and storage materials using various combinations of electro-, magneto-, and thermo-optic effects.
Physical and logical formats are standardized so that media from competing manufacturers can interoperate with devices or drives made by other manufacturers. However, media and device manufacturers were unable to agree on unified standards for writable DVDs, which are accessed with red-light-emitting laser diodes. As it turned out, production of multi-format drives has largely mitigated the problem for users. In the next generation, which uses blue-light-emitting laser diodes, unification looks doubtful even for read-only media. The problem is that the competing Blu-ray and HD DVD groups disagree on the thickness of the protective cover layer, which sets a fundamental optical limit to the storage density. Blu-ray has chosen a 0.1 mm cover layer in order to get 25 Gbytes on single-layer, 120-mm discs. HD DVD retains the 0.6 mm cover layer used with DVDs, which eases the transition in disc production but limits the capacity to 15 Gbytes per layer.
Future generations of optical storage will have to choose between (1) near-field or super-resolution techniques to increase the storage capacity per layer, (2) multi-layer techniques to increase the capacity per disk, or (3) holographic techniques to store more bits in thicker storage layers. Actually, magnetic super resolution is already an established technique. Near-field techniques bring the objective lens into optical (but not physical) contact with the disc in order to increase the optical resolution limit. Surprisingly, a near-field lens controlled by a focus servo (as opposed to a hard-disk-type sliding head) can work reliably in a normal laboratory environment. (This result was independently reported by Sony and Philips workers at the International Symposium on Optical Memory in Jeju, Korea last year.) Promising research on super resolution in phase-change materials, which are more compatible with low-cost devices that read ROM discs, is underway at Junji Tominaga’s laboratory in Tskuba and elsewhere. Two-layer (DVD-9) discs are also in widespread use already, but the method used to eliminate cross-talk (defocusing the unwanted layer) does not scale well to large numbers of layers on a single disc. Holographic storage is a perennial vision for the future. Currently at least two companies, Optware and InPhase, appear to be close to marketing holographic disc technology.
Optware has chosen the ECMA (TC44) route, but Blu-ray, HD DVD and InPhase have not yet committed their specifications to a de-jure standardization venue. Some of this work could be done in B11, but the following perceptions or mis-perceptions would have to be changed:
INCITS/B11 is slow and contentious.
INCITS/B11 is a national standards committee (rather than an international one).
B11 has no finances to report as no money was carried over, collected or spent. A more useful website might help to raise B11’s visibility within the industry. Unfortunately, b11.org is already taken. We could register b11-incits.org, but a better way of showing the relationship is to define a sub-domain such as b11.incits.org. Also, since INCITS does not archive TC documents, it can be hard for new officers to reconstruct things that were done in the past. It would help if a search capability could be added to the INCITS document archives at http://www.incits.org/mail1.htm ..
.