DEVELOPMENT OF OPTICAL DISK TECHNOLOGY IN THE 1990S

The fundamentals of current optical disk technology were developed in the 1970s, and the optical disk production facilities and business inf rastructure were installed in the 1980s. Thus, we are now entering the third decade of the history of optical disk technology. It will be ve ry interesting to see whether we can keep up the same momentum in tech nological development during the 1990s. In this paper, the state of th e art of the current technologies and some of future developments in t he 1990s are discussed. A wide range of techniques for increasing the recording density and obtaining higher transfer rates are discussed.