SBIR-STTR Award

In recent years, secondary storage has become a bottleneck in portable computing and electronics for government, industry, and consumers. Enhancements in storage will continue to lag microprocessor advances for years to come. Nanotronics, Inc. has initiated a research effort that promises to change the paradigm in mass storage, thereby enabling up to 100 times improvement in planar surface storage capacity with concurrent increases in data transfer rate. Nanotronics has developed enhanced deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) polymers that will absorb excitation light energy at a single wavelength and re-emit predetermined multiple wavelengths, all occurring at ambient temperatures. By emitting spectra rather than binary on/off bits, the data word size is increased significantly and parallel access is enabled. Data will be stored in the molecular structure of synthetic DNA, bringing true nanotechnology to science and industry. The diffraction limit of current optical storage systems will be circumvented because data bits per unit area will increase with the number of distinguishable pre-programmed wavelengths. Thus^ wavelength is the third dimension for this optical data storage scheme. Furthermore, a four-dimensional secondary storage scheme may be possible by adding a third spatial dimension that would further multiply the storage density. ^'^

Keywords:
THREE-DIMENSIONAL MULTI-WAVELENGTH OPTICAL DNA DATA POLYMERS STORAGE

Secondary storage technology is currently a bottleneck in system designs of compact and mobile electronic applications for government, industry and consumers. Nanotronics, Inc. has recently completed a proof-of-principle study that promises to change the paradigm in three-dimensional mass storage, increasing optical data storage capacities several orders of magnitude. Enhanced deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) polymers have been designed to absorb light energy at a single wavelength and re-emit at predetermined multiple wavelengths. This molecular device, or unit cell, emits spectra that increase data word size and enables parallel access, all occurring at ambient temperatures and on a planar two dimensional surface. Continued development of this technology focuses on optimizing the material with a commercially viable detector system. Sixteen primary colors from approximately 500 nm to 800 nm will be placed within 0.25 micron sub-sections of a one micron-sized optical portal. Each primary color will have four selectable intensities or wavelength shift sub-states, providing a potential information content of 64 bits per square micron. Using more colors and intensities, or Polarization states, one can obtain even higher information content. Information is thus stored and retrieved from a novel and true molecular scale device.